The following instructions are only valid for creating a emergency repair disk under Windows 95. The Emergency Recovery Utility to create a repair disk is included on the Windows 95 CR-ROM, but is not automatically installed during the Windows installation. You can execute it directly from the Windows CD-ROM, but it is more convenient to copy it to your hard drive.
1. Format a floppy, making sure to check "Copy System Files" in the Format dialog box, since the floppy has to bootable.
2. Run the Emergency Repair Utility by executing the ERU.EXE program. The program will overwrite all the information previously saved to the floppy with the current system information. The Emergency Recovery Utility is shown in Figure 26.
Figure 26. Emergency Repair Utility Window (Floppy Disk)
To use the created repair disk and restore the system files, restart your computer with the repair disk in the floppy drive.
You should run the ERU to update your emergency recovery disk any time before making significant changes to your system, such as installing application suites or Internet browsers. It is best to keep several generations of the emergency recovery disk. That way, if your most recent changes cause problems, you can replace the files with their previous versions.
It is also useful to copy some essential command line utilities to the repair disk, such as FDISK.EXE to investigate your hard disk partitions, CHKDSK.EXE to validate floppy and hard disk drives, FORMAT.EXE to format floppy and hard disk drives, FC.EXE to compare files, SYS.COM to reinstall a boot sector on your hard drive, and a small ASCII text editor.
Note that the Emergency Repair Utility does not copy the common system part of the Registry, stored in the file SYSTEM.DAT, to the floppy because this file exceeds the storage capacity of a 1.4 MB floppy. If you copy the systems files to a directory on a different hard disk, then the SYSTEM.DAT file will be copied.
Also the Emergency Repair Utility copies the default user part of the Registry, stored in the file USER.DAT in the Windows folder to the repair disk. If you have enabled different profiles for different users, then the corresponding USER.DAT files, which are stored in the various user folders in the Profiles folder of the Windows folder, will not be copied to the repair disk.
These two omissions limit significantly the usefulness of the created repair disk. It is strongly recommended that you follow a rigorous backup procedure to allow the restoration of your system after a catastrophic failure of the Registry or the hard drive.