Windows 7 / Getting Started

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Safeguarding Your Computer from a Corrupted Windows RE

If the Windows RE partition has been corrupted or removed, you won't be able to access any of the repair tools. To safeguard your computer against this possibility, you should create a System Repair disc. The repair disc contains a boot image that allows your computer to access a Windows Preinstallation Environment (Windows PE) that includes a Boot Manager and generalized Boot Configuration Data (BCD). The disc also includes tools for automatically fixing the boot sector on your computer's system volume.

To create a repair disc, follow these steps:

1. In Control Panel, under the System and Security heading, click the "Back up your computer" link.
2. On the Backup and Restore page in Control Panel, click "Create a system repair disc" in the left pane.
3. When prompted insert a blank CD or DVD into your computer's read-writable CD/DVD drive and then click Create Disc. If your computer has multiple readwritable CD/DVD drives, you can specify which drive to use.
4. After Backup and Restore prepares and creates the recovery disc, click Close and then click OK. Eject and label the disc "Repair Disc Windows 7 32-bit" or "Repair Disc Windows 7 64-bit" as appropriate.

The repair disc is architecture-specific but not necessarily computer-specific. Typically, you can use any 32-bit repair disc to repair any 32-bit Windows 7 installation and any 64-bit repair disc to repair any 64-bit Windows 7 Installation. So if you encounter a problem and aren't able to access the recovery tools on your computer, you can create a repair disc on another computer with the same architecture as yours and then use this disc for recovery.

To use the repair disc, insert the repair disc into your computer's primary CD/DVD drive and then boot your computer from the disc. You then be able to access the recovery environment as discussed previously under "Recovering Your Computer Using Windows RE". If your computer doesn't allow booting from a disc, you'll need to change the boot options in firmware and then repeat this step.