Weird Boot Message from Windows 7 Repair DVD

[Chris4877]

Hi, all!

Greetings from Sydney, Australia!

I'm running Windows 7 Ultimate x64 SP1. (English, with Australian localisations - en_AU).

I just created a Windows Repair Disk using the Windows Backup and Restore app
in Control Panel.

The program seemed to run without error, at least, there was a message to say
that the repair disk was created successfully.

However, when I ran a test boot from it, I received a strange message.

I inserted the DVD in the drive, checked that the BIOS would look for bootable files
on an optical disk before looking on the hard disk, and waited for the usual boot message:

"Press any key to boot from CD or DVD..."

What I got was the following:

"Libovolnou klávesou spustíte systém z disku CD nebo DVD..."

which I used Google to translate and tell me what the language was.

The language is Czech, and the message is the Czech translation of the "Press any key..." message
quoted above.

Anyway, I pressed "Enter" and the DVD booted with English Windows, and it seemed to run OK.

Does anyone have any idea why the "Press any key..." message would be in Czech, or, for that
matter, any language other than English, considering that I am running an English version of Windows?

Thanks in advance for any possible solutions to this little mystery!

Best regards to you all
Christopher ("Chris") Souter
(Sydney, Australia)

[Medico]

Good morning Chris from down under, or should I say good afternoon to you and welcome to the Lounge,

Are you positive the Windows version is English? Do you have the Ultimate edition with language packs installed? If so perhaps something was screwed up during the installation and you should look to uninstall the language packs. This is just a guess on my part. I do not see how else a different language could have arrived on your PC except as a part of the language packs.

[Chris4877]

Yes, you're right, I do have Ultimate with the language packs installed, but English is still the language in use, and was at the time I made the recovery disk, so I can't see why the disk should have been made with a different language, at least for the boot message.

[Medico]

Can you go in and eliminate all languages but those you need installed to see if this solves your problem? During the WU of my Win 7 I think I could choose which languages to allow. Perhaps you could choose to delete those unused languages as well. Might be worth trying!

[Chris4877]

OK, I'll give it a try later on and see what happens. It'll be a bit of a time-consuming procedure, so I'll have to get back to you later.

[Chris4877]

Well, I uninstalled all the language packs, so there is now only English (Australia) installed.

I then created the recovery disk from a DVD, left it in the drive, restarted and waited for the "Press any key..." message.

It never appeared.

All there was was a blinking cursor following the "Verifying DMI Pool Data..." message.

I waited for a few minutes to see if anything was going to happen, and, when nothing did, I hit <Enter>.

The DVD then started to boot. I was able to find the system image, etc., and it all seemed to work, so I removed the DVD and restarted the machine.

When I looked more closely at the DVD, I found that there was only about 164MB on it, so I decided to make a CD rather than a DVD.

I then restarted with the CD in the drive, the "Press any key..." message duly appeared (in English), I then pressed <Enter>, and the system booted from the CD.

The system started up without any errors, and I was able to navigate easily to the system image for restoration.

It was only then that I noticed something strange.

The system image had been correctly identified by the system (after all, it is the only one), but the time zone was shown as GMT-8, (US Pacific Standard Time), whereas my correct time zone is GMT+11 (Australian Eastern Summer [Daylight Saving] Time).

I was only testing the restore function, so I cancelled the procedure and restarted from the hard disk.

Nevertheless, I am now left with this question:

If I had gone ahead and restored that system image, would all the file dates and times have been incorrect, or would Windows have corrected them when it was restarted from the hard disk after the restoration?

Interesting question, don't you think?

[curiousclive]

Its likely once windows loads it would revert to the time settings you have set in control panel.

[Medico]

I would think so as well. It does seem as though the Language packs had somehow caused the incorrect language to show on your Repair disk. That is unless of course you are attempting to learn Czech! Just a little levity there. It's very early here and haven't finished my first cup of yet. Hope everything else is well. Have a great rest of the weekend, what's left of it there.

[Chris4877]

So, you think it would be OK to restore from the backup, even though the time zone is incorrect?

I guess I'll never know unless I have to try it some day.

IIRC, the file creation/modification/access time is actually stored as UTC, and translated to local time by the OS. I'm pretty sure
that's how it's done in Unix, so maybe Windows does the same thing.

Something else for me to research.

So, two interesting problems.

1. Why on earth would Windows create a repair disk with a boot message in any language other than the language currently in use?

2. Why would the Windows repair disk assume UTC-8 for the time zone? The repair disc should have two user-configurable settings
on startup: (a) choose keyboard layout; and (b) choose time zone. That second setting is unavailable.

Anyway, I'll do some more research and see what I can come up with.

Many thanks to both of you for your suggestions!

Yes, Ted, the Australian weekend is now over, but it makes no difference to me anyway, because I'm retired!

Best regards
Chris Souter