Windows Secrets Newsletter • Issue 87 • 2006-11-30 • Circulation: over 400,000

By Fred Langa Software and hardware are supposed to help us. But sometimes our tools turn against us, causing more problems than they solve and leading to frustration, delays, and costly failures. Today, I look at some normally docile, usually helpful tools — such as Windows’ Recovery Console, which is software, and laptop batteries, which are hardware — to see how they can run amok, and what you can do about it.

How to recover from Recovery Console

We’ve discussed Windows’ Recovery Console many times. (Here’s a search-engine listing of a few dozen of my past articles on the subject.) As a quick refresher, the Recovery Console is an optionally-installed tool that’s included with every full version of XP. (Alas, some OEM versions omit it, though.)

The Recovery Console lets you perform the XP equivalent of “booting to DOS.” This allows you to log on as Administrator and perform low-level analysis, maintenance and repair. It’s an incredibly useful tool for troubleshooting, and installing it is on my list of “must do” tweaks for XP.

Although you can run the Recovery Console from the setup CD of any full version of XP (again, not all OEM CDs allow this), the faster and better way of accessing it is to install it on your hard drive. That way, it’s just a click away when you need it.

Recovery Console is really just a subset of XP, minus the graphical user interface. But XP’s boot system treats the Recovery Console as if it were an entirely separate operating system. Thus, after installing the Recovery Console, your boot screen will give you a dual-boot option: Booting to the normal, full XP you started with, or booting to the Recovery Console.

Normally, the boot-option screen gives you 30 seconds to choose which OS you want to run. If you make no choice in the allotted time, the system boots to the default OS, which — again, normally — is your original, full version of XP. But the key word there is “normally.” This reader’s Recovery Console installation somehow got very badly messed up:

• “I recently installed the Recovery Console, but now am wondering whether I also can uninstall the feature. I cannot find it any more on my PC, but every time I start up my computer I have to choose which system to start. This I do not want to do each time.” —Theo van Rijen
  

The short answer is yes, Theo, and I’ll show you how to uninstall it in a moment. But I suspect what you’d really prefer is a way to make the Recovery Console work the way it’s supposed to. That means it’s still there if you need it, but in a way that doesn’t mess up your boot sequence.

There are several ways to fix things. Perhaps the simplest is to use msconfig, which lets you set your system’s default OS, edit the boot option menu, set how long the boot options remain visible, and more.

Click Start, Run, type msconfig in the Run dialog box and press Enter. The msconfig utility will open. Select the boot.ini tab, which shows you the contents of the file of the same name. The boot.ini file is what controls which OS boots, what order the OSes are shown on the screen, and more.


Figure 1. Some startup problems can be fixed easily by editing the boot.ini file.

Note that the lines in the boot.ini files are broken in two sections, one called [boot loader] and one called [operating systems].

In the [boot loader] section, note the timeout=3 line. This is how long the boot option screen remains visible on my system. The default is 30 seconds, but I prefer a very short boot delay. With a boot timeout of just 3 seconds, I can jump in and select the Recovery Console when I need it, but otherwise the boot continues automatically in very short order.

You can set your boot delay (timeout) to be whatever you want via the Timeout entry box in the right center of the dialog. Just type in the number of seconds you prefer.

The next line in the [boot loader] section identifies the location of the default operating system that will automatically boot at the and of the timeout. In my case it’s:

default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)WINDOWS

If I’d chosen the Recovery Console to be the default boot option, the line would read:

default=C:CMDCONSBOOTSECT.DAT.

If your PC has a default OS set (and it most likely does), your “default” line probably looks like one of the examples above. But if, like Theo, you have no default set — or if you have the wrong default set — don’t worry, it’s a snap to fix.

In the [operating systems] portion of the dialog, click on the OS you want to make the default, and then click the Set As Default button. That’s all it takes!

Once your [boot loader] section contains both a timeout= and a default= entry, your system should boot normally to whichever OS you set as the default, and after whatever timeout delay you indicated.

If you still want to uninstall the Recovery Console, you can, although not from inside msconfig. Instead, you manually edit the boot.ini file with Notepad and delete the following line from the [operating systems] section of the file:

C:CMDCONSBOOTSECT.DAT=”Microsoft Windows Recovery Console” /cmdcons

Microsoft provides full instructions in the Knowledge Base document How to edit the Boot.ini file in Windows XP, so I won’t repeat the details here. Once you’ve eliminated references to the Recovery Console from the boot.ini file, you can delete the Recovery Console files themselves, usually located at C:cmdcons

By the way, while you’re poking around the Microsoft Knowledge Base, you also might want to take a look at Description of the Windows XP Recovery Console and How to install and use the Recovery Console in Windows XP. It really is is a must-have tool!

How to automatically defrag your paging file

In LangaList issues just prior to me joining Windows Secrets, we were discussing the whys and hows of performing maintenance on two parts of Windows that normally operate below most users’ radar.

For example, I discussed defragging the MFT or Master File Table (as defined at NTFS.com) in “MFT Needs Its Space” on Oct. 9. I also discussed manual methods for defragging the paging file (aka “swap file”) in “Can Swap Files Cause Blue Screens Of Death?” on Sept. 21 and “How to Keep Your Paging File Defragmented” on Nov. 2.

Reader Chris wrote in to remind us of a free tool that can automatically defrag your paging file — even at every boot, if you so desire. It’s Sysinternals’ PageDefrag. A full explanation and the free download are available via that link. Thanks, Chris!

Try unplugging if you’re stuck offline

Reader Don Pooley found that, in PC’s, “off” doesn’t always mean “off.”

• “One day last week I was unable to get online. No e-mail or Web access! My first thought was that my cable provider was having problems, but there was no improvement all that day. [After normal troubleshooting didn't help] I decided to just unplug the electrical outlets under my desk, after fully shutting down and turning everything off, of course. Turned everything back on, and was back online! So, when all else fails, unplug!”
  

Thanks, Don. Here’s why that worked: The “power switch” on the front of most PCs today is not really a power switch, but rather a switch that sends a signal to the PC’s low-level ACPI (Advanced Configuration & Power Interface) subsystem. This is the same subsystem that Windows accesses to implement its power-management schemes. (For tech detail, please see my InformationWeek article on ACPI’s various operating modes.)

Even when nominally “off,” most PCs continue to draw a trickle of power to keep the ACPI system alive. This allows the PC to wake up in response to external events such as a mouse click, key press, network activity, and the like.

The system’s real power switch — the one that actually stops power from flowing into the PC — is usually on the back of the power supply. Flipping that switch (or pulling the plug from the wall socket) is the only way to be sure that your PC (or similar device) is really, truly off. And, as Don found, that kind of total power-off is sometimes the only way to get a device to “snap out” of an error state it’s stuck in.

A must-see video on laptop batteries

You’ve probably heard about the recall of Sony-made laptop batteries that affected millions of owners of machines, with the bulk being Dell and Apple. The problem was that the defective batteries could overheat, causing burns or even starting fires. (Talk about your tools turning against you!)

Not all Sony batteries were included in the recall, and — statistically speaking — the odds of a fire are pretty slim. But this dramatic video from PCPitstop shows what can happen when the power in a laptop battery is released in an uncontrolled way.

(Note: The video does not auto-play. It uses the YouTube convention for activating a video window that’s becoming a de facto standard online: You have to click twice to get it to play; once in the movie window where the enlarged Play symbol appears, and then again on the actual Play button below the movie window.)

Despite the potential seriousness of the battery problem, some laptop owners are ignoring the recall. In fact, Dell has had to issue a second notice to registered laptop owners to try to get everyone to check. If you haven’t already done so, check the Web site of your portable gear’s manufacturer (Dell or otherwise) to make sure that you don’t have any of the recalled batteries. If you do, the manufacturer should have a mechanism in place to get you a free replacement.

Fred Langa is the editor of Windows Secrets & LangaList. He edited the LangaList e-mail newsletter from 1997 to 2006, when it merged with Windows Secrets. Prior to that, he was editor of Byte Magazine and editorial director of CMP Media, overseeing Windows Magazine and others.