Active Partition Followup and Microsoft DaRT
Several months ago I ran into that issue with accidentally rebooting a server after changing the “active” partition and ending up with a nonbootable system. We solved it with a linux boot CD (not unlike Trinity , although the one we used was specifically oriented towards disk management), but I’ve just learned that there are Microsoft tools that could do the same thing. What we were unable to find at the time is DaRT . That’s Microsoft’s Diagnostics and Recovery Toolkit. As the name informs, it’s a pretty sweet suite of tools that can be used to diagnose and recover from a variety of Windows problems. Here’s a list of some cool use cases: Reset a local administrator password Edit the local Registry Restore deleted files (assuming those sectors haven’t been overwritten) Securely delete a partition or drive Open Computer Management (including Disk Management, which is what I needed back then!) Copy files to/from the system with Explorer and network...