Emergency Boot Disk
When Vista won’t boot and before you can determine what repairs are needed, you’ll want to boot the suspect machine to try to see what’s gone wrong or what may be missing. For this job, the command line facility in either the WinRE or WinPE boot UFD can help. Use it to look for specific files at the root of the system drive such as bootmgr, bootsect.bak, and so forth. Use it to check system disk integrity with chkdsk or chkntfs, or check OS files with the sfc /verifyonly command (works only on the WinPE version). As you learn more about the tools available to you at the Vista command line, you’ll also learn how to use them to check and repair your system as well.