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View Full Version : Emergency Repair Disk files too large (WNT)


dminard
04-24-2002, 05:51 PM
For some reason, the files that Rdisk /s gather are too large to fit onto a single floppy therefore the system refuses to make an Emergency Repair Disk for me. I have been unable to find any advice on what to do in this situation. Does anyone have any advice?
BertImmenschuh
04-24-2002, 06:17 PM
The last time I made WinNT WorkStation R disks, it needed 3 x 1.44MB HD floppies. They had to be freshly formatted.
Andy-S
04-24-2002, 06:42 PM
When you use RDISK /s the utility should backup all of the registry to C:\%winntroot%\repair and then prompt you to insert a diskette to update or create a new repair disk (single diskette). The default directory for saving the files is C:\winnt\repair.

What is the exact error you are seeing?

Cheers
Andy
dminard
04-25-2002, 03:28 AM
The total size of the files saved is approx. 1.9MB. When the utility tries to save them to a disk, they obviously don't fit and it merely tells me that it failed. When you made yours to 3 disks, did you save the files manually to the disks, or did the utility somehow ask you to keep inserting disks?
dminard
04-25-2002, 03:30 AM
It works as you say, but the files total up to more than a disk will hold so the utility just says that the operation failed.
BertImmenschuh
04-25-2002, 05:42 AM
It just kept asking for another disk. But it has been 2 years since I did it. I have the disks left in my 'archive' brown paper box somewhere in my storage shed.
Andy-S
04-25-2002, 01:51 PM
The three disks Bert is talkin about are the setup disks and not the repair disk. The ERD is one diskette.

I found an article that tells you how to get round the files being too large.

If you do back up the sam._ and security._ files (which you should do if you can), you may some day find that you can no longer fit all of the files on a floppy disk. Remember that the entire contents of the %systemroot%\repair folder is copied to the ERD, so you must keep its size under 1.44MB. Should the folder grow too large, take the ERD from the original Windows NT installation (or from \repair2) and copy only the sam._ and security._ files into the %systemroot%\repair folder. The folder should now be small enough to make an ERD. If it's not, you need to reduce the size of setup.log. Edit setup.log and locate the line "[Files.WINNT]", which is followed by a long list of file names. You can safely delete any of these file names that do not begin with %systemroot%\SYSTEM32\. At some point in this list you may find a line "[Files.InRepairDirectory]"; do not delete anything after this line!

<a target="_blank" href=http://www.billsmith7.net/software/nt-erd.html>http://www.billsmith7.net/software/nt-erd.html</a>

Cheers
Andy