The question: How do you get to the Recovery Console? The Reason: Out of concern for those who only have Recovery CD rather than Windows XP cd, are there alternative method to get it?

Dont know if this works for recovery disks. With windows running-insert the setup cd. select run-If d: is the cdrom- type D:\i386\winnt32.exe/cmdcons and follow the instructions.

Follow up. The recovery console files have to be put on the HD for it to work.

Just boot up with the XP CD then press R for the recovery console, simple :-) Don't need to copy anything to the HDD ________________________ MSI KT8 NEO Athlon 64 3200+ @ 2.0ghz 1.0 GB DDR PC3200 2X 160 GB HDD Hightech Excalibur Radeon 9800 Pro Iceq 128mb ( Core 425 MHz and Memory 380 MHz )

Zero cool-for the recovery console to be usable, the files MUST be on the HD. They create a folder named CMDCONS on C: drive.

Good News . . . something that wasn't even documented anywhere on the Net to my knowedge. On one machine (Sony VAIO) having Windows XP Home preinstalled, I ran c:\windows\I386\winnt32.exe /cmdcons from the command line. This in turn prompted a Windows Setup box to appear - with an exclamation mark, with the following dialogues: "You can install the Windows Recovery Console as a startup option. The Recovery Console helps you gain access to your Windows installation to replace damaged files and disable or enable services." "If You cannot start the Recovery Console from your computer's hard disk, you can run the Recovery Console from the Windows Setup CD." "The Recovery Console requires 7MB of hard disk space. "Do you want to install the Recovery Console? The above indicates to me that there is another way (very useful to those that don't have Windows XP CD) to create the Recovery Console. Cheers

Very cool XpUser. Glad i was able to help.