Introduction

Product:
ERD Commander 2002 (Product Page)
Winternals Software
MSRP $399

ERD Commander is a very powerful tool. It comes in the form of an ISO file which is burned to a CD which is a diagnostic and recovery boot disk for Windows 7 and Vista. Part 2: What Can You Do with ERD Commander for Windows 7/Vista ERD Commander can help diagnose an offline copy of Microsoft Windows. ERD Commander 2005 boots dead systems directly from CD into a Windows-like repair environment. You'll have full access to the dead system's volumes, so you can diagnose and repair problems using tools located on the ERD Commander 2005 Start menu.

1. Microsoft have made it difficult to get hold of ERD Commander for Vista and Windows 7. ERD Commander was orginally available as ERD Commander 2003 – part of the Winternals Admin Pack. But since Winternals was bought by Microsoft in 2006, ERD Commander is no longer an over-the-counter product available to the general public. However, it is clear that there is.
2. Version of ERD commander 5.0 to restore Windows XP / server 2003 with integrated SATA / SCSI / RAID drivers + instructions to remove the banners. Integrated whole set of mass storage drivers from the package Driverpasks base 10.11, ie, works with virtually all laptops and servers (2003).

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System Requirements:
Windows XP, 2000, and NT
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Back in April of 1999 we reviewed a little god-send disaster recovery tool called 'ERD Commander Professional.' Well, guess who's back (cue Dr. Dre-like strumming harp backbeat)? Today we're looking at ERD Commander 2002, the latest version of this disaster recovery utility. ERD Commander 2002 has been out for a while, but it's usefulness deserves your attention. ERD Commander 2002? (hereafter, 'ERD') treats XP, Win2K, and NT 4.0 systems (both server and client), and pretty much allows you to recover almost any non-booting NT-based system, so long as the problem isn't hardware related (a dead hard drive, for example--but it even helps when hardware is bleak). In this review we're going to cover the pluses and minuses of ERD, and ultimately answer the question: should you have this utility?

Inevitability

As the Microsoft core OS design philosophy that was once affectionately known as 'New Technology' continues to mature, more and more end users are coming into contact with that OS's children, and thus also coming into conflict with their older DOS-based understandings of how to resurrect a system that is not booting properly. With NT-based OSes, including Windows 2000 and Windows XP, you can't simply slap a DOS disk in the floppy drive and gain access to the NTFS file system or the registry, for example. Boot-time problems on NT-based OSes can be scary because the default tools don't always solve your problem. Rolling back to your 'last known good configuration' works well, but what happens when you can't get to the boot menu, or if the 'last known good' isn't actually good? Obviously NT-based OSes have some built-in recovery/repair tools (these won't be rehearsed here), and ERD Commander 2002 is not meant to be an indictment of these tools' limitations. Indeed, as you'll soon see, the capabilities of ERD are such that it would be unlikely that Microsoft would distribute such power to end users en masse.?

Now, if you work in tech support, you will eventually meet a system that will not boot owing to a software or OS configuration issue, and the default support tools will not help. It doesn't happen all that often, but it does happen, and if your life is like mine, it probably happens to the Dean's computer a day before he's supposed to meet with the President. And he's saved crucial data locally. In such scenarios, there's nothing quite like going through an entire NT repair process just to find that it a) didn't help at all, or b) simply exchanged one error for another.

Now, unfortunately in the world of Windows there's this tech-support chickening-out that I like to call the wimpy reinstall methodology. Got a problem? Reinstall the OS. Worried about losing data? Uh, just reinstall the OS into another directory (say, into c:NTOS), and then import data without blowing away the partition.

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*puke*

With the right tools and the right knowledge, the number of unnecessary re-installs a tech would need to do would be few. Now, whether or not it is cost effective to try and resurrect a bad system versus just blowing it away is a matter for IT Managers to decide. If you work somewhere where all of your users are in an Active Directory will full roaming, and your fully-configured default desktop is a Ghosting session away, and your users actually save all of their data to the file server instead of some random folder on their system, then a re-install might be the best way to go. (And you might check to see if you have a pulse, because you may have in fact died and gone to heaven.)

If not, it's time to think about tools that will let you quickly penetrate systems that are massively borked, even at times when the local machine password is not even known. Welcome to ERD Commander 2002. No, it's not a tool for the casual user. It's a tool for the professional, or perhaps the extremely depserate.

Erd Commander Windows 10

Key Features

First let's outline the key features of this newest release of ERD. I've highlighted the completely new features of the 2002 version. Sorry to drop all of this on ya in this fashion, but here at Ars we're not huge fans of the '11 pages of 3 pages-worth of material' philosophy.

First up, ERD is now CD-ROM bootable (new). Nearly all systems which are capable of running an NT-based OS well will support bootable CD-ROMs by this point in history. This is preferable to a cavalcade of floppies, being both more reliable and certainly much faster, and it also removes the previous hassle of building rescue disks, etc. Once you boot up, you can take advantage of ERD's Event Log viewing capabilities (new). System, security and application logs are there for the viewing (and for searching). If you're lucky, the cause of your problem will be laid out before your eyes. If you're not lucky there will be a gaggle of error messages that are poorly descriptive and turn out to be dead ends. But to have access to this material in such as easy fashion is a boon to any support tech.

Perhaps most impressive to both older ERD fans and newbies alike is ERD's GUI based operation (new). As you see below, ERD's GUI follows the Win95-based Start button motif, which makes its use rather intuitive to use, and more importantly, quicker. Fortunately the GUI is a real GUI, and not one of those nightmare 'we try and make it look like a real GUI' ASCII apparitions. How is this possible? The GUI framework has been licensed from Microsoft; more on that in a minute.?

Nothing is more convenient than getting a half-dead box up on the LAN so you can easily move files, get apps, etc., without playing a lot of games. Thankfully, ERD now has TCP/IP Configuration(new) to help ease the pain. When ERD boots, it attempts to configure the network using DHCP. Should that fail, this tool will allow you to manually configure the NIC configuration to help get your repair session on-line. With a working NIC, ERD can start the network (provided it's available) and give you access to your typical network (NetBIOS-only) shares. In the case of an extremely flakey system, this at least ensures that you can move data off the system easily. We tested this on three different machines, and it worked flawlessly, even with an older (crappy) NE2000-based Ethernet card (an Accton, to be specific).