I got to work today and booted my macbook. Having forgotten that I switched it to boot Windows the night before, I didn’t hold the Option key to boot into Mac OS 10.5 (for work needs. I wouldn’t dare keep it otherwise). I wasn’t paying much attention to what was going on with the screen as I was in the middle of a meeting, but I got back to it after about 5 minutes and came upon the above scene unfolding on my laptop. It was vaguely familiar; Paul Thurrott reminded me later that it’s an offshoot of the Windows Recovery Environment which is now integrated into Windows 7 as opposed to being contained solely on the installation DVD.
The fact that the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE) would be contained in the Windows 7 installation is nothing new; reviewers covered this after their reviews went live on Windows 7 keynote day at PDC. However, no one has actually seen it work, so here I am.
Yes, it actually works.
In my case, my instance of build 6801 died on an “unknown bugcheck: 12b” which led to WinRE being launched. The recovery mechanism checked for issues, subsequently asked me if I’d like to use system restore to roll back to the last working point, rolled back, and presented me with full details of all of its scans (some of which you’ll see in my quick-n-dirty BlackBerry shots). After all of that, it rebooted and voila, Windows 7!
I didn’t lose Rafael’s BlueBadging either, though Rafael did lose his mind over how irritating this feature might become for techs.
Catch the remaining three pics after the break, and feel free to leave your thoughts on whether you think this will or will not be useful to home users, nerd users, sysadmins, etc.
If you’re with the Windows Error Reporting team, please check your error reports for this one. 4th pic contains the most relevant information.
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[...] Surprisingly it worked, as Bryant indicated… but that’s not the point. After everything was said and done, I felt like I just jumped through a bunch of technical support hoops to fix a problem I already knew how to fix on my own but couldn’t. [...]
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Problem is it also repairs Vista installations. Now I had a dual boot setup and was switching between 2 primary partitions, one with Vista and other with Windows 7, because it also “repaired” the Vista partition when it wasn’t active, the install can’t start now if I make the Vista partition active.
The problem was your MacBook
This may be unrelated, but I think because I used a Vista Recovery Console on my 7 installation while installing Mac OS X, I noticed my bootscreen had changed to that of Vista, and now Hibernation doesn’t work, Shutdown sometimes doesn’t shut down and when waking up from Sleep, it starts to do weird things like non-working taskbar and unable to start programs etc.
Windows 7 recovery disk (made with the create recovery disk utility in 7 (recdisc.exe)) doesn’t find any errors, but this is very annoying.
So how do we get in to Safe Mode if we have to do something that requires that? Really hope that they add an Advanced item that shows the old menu.
[...] 7 Error Recovery actually works! Windows 7 Error Recovery actually works! I got to work today and booted my macbook. Having forgotten that I switched it to boot Windows [...]
I’d be careful though, there were instances of data loss reported with UAC, atleast from what I heard and the people that I’ve talked to have had experiences with it… so.. Just a word of caution.
@Hiroshi – “Data loss reported with UAC” ????? Next time please KNOW what you’re talking about before you post. UAC has NOTHING to do with WinRE!!!! Zilch, narda, nothing.
My computer has been broken, and this actually helped me well, else i would have lost all my files, Like i remember in vista :S
Thanks Microsoft For this thingg!!
yes..tried it and it actually works..\m/