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Remember in the past when problems arose in Windows 3.1 or Windows 95 rendering the system unbootable? You would frantically rummage through presses and drawers until you found an appropriate boot disk, and would heave a sigh of relief when the drives of the troublesome machine could once again be accessed for repair and salvage. This boot-floppy approach to system recovery was a lifesaver on countless occasions. Until recent times though, Windows NT and Windows 2000 administrators have gone without such a recovery option.

ERD Commander 2000 now brings boot-floppy functionality to Windows NT and Windows 2000. Designed for Windows NT 4.0 and 2000 platforms, ERD Commander 2000 is an impressive repair and recovery tool, the kind that makes you feel safe under any circumstances as you will always know there is a way out, or in, as the case may be. The alternative to repairing an unbootable Windows NT/2000 system without a tool like this is akin to backing up your network using floppy disks instead of an intelligent tape backup system. Backing up, reformatting, re-installing, downloading updates from the Internet, copying data from back-ups, and de-fragmenting drives is a process that could continue for days. ERD Commander 2000 prevents this. With it you repair a system in minutes, saving precious time as well as rescuing your crucial data.

ERD Commander 2000 is undoubtedly a powerful safety net for systems administrators if disaster should strike. If you feel secure just depending on the rescue features of Microsoft's standard emergency repair disk, or the Windows 2000 recovery console, you may want to download a trial version and do a comparison. While the aforementioned utilities do a lot, for the extra features and flexibility it offers you will not be breaking the bank investing in a copy of ERD Commander 2000. Because the product relies on a standard set of Windows NT/2000 boot floppies, any Windows NT/2000 system is accessible and all NT file systems, including FAT, NTFS and CDFS are visible. ERD Commander 2000 does not rely on data located on a system's hard disk for it to boot and run, as the Windows NT/2000 kernel is actually booted from the floppies. So, Windows NT/2000 does not even have to be present on the computer in order to use the product to access the computer drives.

At its simplest, ERD Commander 2000 fixes problems that prevent Windows NT/2000 from booting, and salvages systems without losing critical data. Providing a command-line based Windows NT/2000 environment that boots from a set of 3.5" floppy disks, a CD-ROM, or directly from the hard disk, it enables you to do a host of crucial tasks. These include recovering systems by giving you complete access to all files and the system registry hive, letting you replace missing or corrupt files, editing configuration information, or deleting drivers or software that prevent your system from booting. ERD Commander 2000's environment mirrors the standard Windows NT/2000 console-mode environment, so users familiar with commands like COPY, MOVE, DELETE, RENAME, XCOPY can confidently use it.

When a downed system is booted using ERD Commander 2000, access is provided to every drive and device available from NT/2000, including floppy, JAZ and CD-ROM drives. Administrators can then remove or replace corrupted drivers, update system files, correct security mistakes that prevent the operating system from booting, recover from improperly installed Service Packs or other updates, and copy essential files off a dead system.

With ERD Commander 2000 you can easily disable or enable drivers and services in a Windows NT/2000 installation with the Device and Service command. The Chkdsk command lets you easily check and repair volumes, while the Ftdisk command lets you access the fault-tolerant drives defined for an installation, including mirrors, volume sets, stripe sets and stripe sets with parity. The Expand command makes it possible to extract compressed files on a Windows NT/2000 distribution CD onto a hard drive from within ERD Commander 2000, and the Compress command lets you compress files and directories into CAB files for easy transfer to another system.

Support for FAT32 drives is built-in, allowing access to data on Windows 98 disks in a dual-boot system. The password command will let you change account passwords so that you can regain entry into a system that you've been locked out of. This is a good security feature, especially if several people with different levels of responsibility have access to the same machine.

ERD Commander 2000 can be used to help you solve some of the following recurrent and old reliable problems. You can use it to delete the image files of drivers or services that, because of a bug or misconfiguration, prevent Windows NT/2000 from booting, update out-of-date system files, correct misconfigured NTFS security by unlocking otherwise inaccessible files or directories, update locked files, and correct registry problems amongst others.

ERD Commander 2000 also supports fault-tolerant drives, while a built-in registry editor eliminates the need to move registry files for editing and then return them to the damaged machine. This is a new feature in version 2.0, and much appreciated I am sure, by all practitioners of the previous editing method. Another extremely useful feature is the use of batch files, enabling the system administrator to build custom repair and recovery scripts that can be automatically executed by anyone.

I can see the word spreading about this product among hassled system administrators, especially because of the in-built registry editor and batch file features.
 

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