Improving the Windows XP Recovery Console

[Will.Spencer]

Fred Langa has written an excellent article on improving the Windows XP Recovery Console called The OS Inside the OS.

Originally Posted by The OS Inside the OS

Windows XP's Recovery Console is a very restricted version of XP that's been stripped to its barest fundamentals--it's got just enough to get the operating system going, with none of the usual bells and whistles. This skeletal version of the operating system is intended to effect repairs and perform low-level maintenance, and for those purposes it's a very good tool.

But it's also very limited. By default, it restricts you to working in just a few systems folders, refusing you access to any other part of your hard drive. It prevents you from using "wildcards" (such as "*.exe" to represent all files ending in "exe"). It won't let you copy files to removable media such as floppies. And you're always prompted when overwriting each and any file.

Fortunately, a simple tweak that can be performed in under a minute removes all those restrictions and frees up Recovery Console to let you work anywhere on the hard drive, access and use removable media such as floppies, use wildcards to work on large groups of files or folders at once, and skip the overwrite warnings if you so choose.

With this tweak, Recovery Console becomes, in effect, a general-purpose XP DOS, serving much the same function as did DOS boot floppies for earlier versions of Windows. With the Recovery Console's limitations removed, you can then access any file or folder anywhere on your hard drive ...