I also found it interesting that I can boot the CD and take a look at non-NT MS OSes, and even mount the network (if I have a PnP NIC).Īs you can see, ERD appears to be very powerful. Furthermore, it has support for single-CPU and multi-CPU HALs. Other noteworthy items: unlike NTFSDOS, ERD supports hardware based (only!) Fault Tolerant drives (e.g., RAID setups). Likewise, you get System Info: basic information about the systems OS, service pack level, and applied hotfixes, and Volumes: detailed information on your local drive is available with this tool. (I think it is Microsoft's notepad, actually). It has support for in-text searches (Ctrl-F) and Unicode characters. Then, with Notepad, you get a a text editor that looks pretty much exactly like Windows' notepad. With the built-in Search, you can search by name, size, date, and/or extension. To round out the tools, there's the basics. Rollback or last known good not working for you? Take matters into your own hands. This tool allows you to modify the properties of services on your system much like the service manager on a normally booting system. One of the nice things about ERD, however, is that you don't have to play with the registry to do the things you'd expect to be able to do with a Service and Driver Manager, because it's included in the form of the Computer Management Console. Microsoft would be insane to give the Recovery Console that much power, but ERD has it. But the big boon is that you have access to everything. It also behaves mostly the same, meaning that you can drag and drop files and rename file in-place.

File Explorer looks almost exactly like Explorer, which is a good thing (IMO). ERD can access any FAT (16 or 32), NTFS or CDFS file system mounted on your system, and it is not limited to %systemroot or %windir%, as in the MS Recovery Console. I can get that already in a MS recovery session.' Well, that's true, but you can't get ERD's File Explorer. Now, right now you might be thinking 'console, woopty-do. Those of you familiar with the previous version of ERD will be right at home here, should you choose to be.

And of course, there's ERD's version of CHKDSK, to boot. Console has support for basic file operations as well as attrib, map, service, and xcopy. It's more or less just like CMD.EXE in terms of standard operations. But here's your place to shine, as ERD offers an extremely useful Console.

I stopped myself short of crying out for joy over the GUI because I knew some console-loving freak would attack me.

Microsoft erd commander