Use a Windows Repair Disc or USB Drive to Fix Your Broken PC

Having the whole operating system on disc isn’t necessary if you just need to repair your Windows installation. Recovering or repairing your current installation of Windows is favorable because most recovery software that comes with brand name PCs will wipe your PC back to factory settings.You should have a repair disc on hand to deal with the following situations:

You’ve made a change to your PC and it now won’t boot into Windows
You get a message such as NTLDR is missing but your hard drive has not failed
You get a virus on your PC and need command line access to fix the issue
Windows starts to boot and then your PC power cycles

In this guide:

How to make a Windows 7 repair disc yourself
How to make a Windows 7 repair USB drive
How to boot from a disc/USB drive and use it to repair your PC

Note: A repair disc cannot be used to install Windows and provides no functionality beyond that of a Windows installation disc. If you already have an installation disc, you can use that for system recovery.

Burn a Windows Vista/7 Repair Disc

To burn your own Windows repair disc you’ll need to be using Windows 7 or Windows Vista SP1 or later release:

1. Click Start, type create and click Create a System Repair Disc (Windows 7) or Create a Recovery Disc (Windows Vista)

2. Insert a CD/DVD, choose the DVD drive in which the disc resides and click Create Disc

Once the disc is finished, I recommend booting from the disc to test it—before you really need it.

Make a Windows Vista/7 Repair USB drive

If you own a netbook, don’t have an optical (CD/DVD/Bluray) drive etc., you should create a bootable USB repair drive.

To make a bootable Windows repair USB drive you’ll need to:

Download the Windows recovery disc
Make your thumb drive bootable
Copy the recovery files to your thumb drive

1. Download the Windows Recovery Disc

Note: These links come with no warranty. I’ve downloaded these torrents and scanned them and they are clean:

How to use torrents.

2. Make your Thumb Drive Bootable

To prepare your USB thumb drive, you will need to delete all the drive’s files, create a FAT32 active partition, and copy over the Windows installation files. To do this:

2.1. Press Windows Key+R to open the Run dialog

2.2. Type diskpart and press Enter (If you don’t have diskpart, get it here)

2.3. Type list disk and press Enter

2.4. Type select disk 3 where the “3″ is the corresponding number of your USB drive

2.5. Type clean and press Enter

2.6. Type create partition primary and press Enter

2.7. Type active and press Enter

2.8. Type format fs=fat32 quick and press Enter

2.9. Type assign and press Enter to assign the USB drive a letter in Computer

3. Copy the Recovery Files to Your Thumb Drive.

To copy the files to your thumb drive:

3.1. Open the file you downloaded in step 1 with a utility capable of browsing ISO images (7 zip works well)

Download 7zip and install it
Right click the ISO file and select 7-Zip > Open Archive

3.2. Extract the contents of the ISO to the USB drive you formatted in step 2

Boot from a Disc/USB Drive and Use it to Repair Your PC

So now you’ve either downloaded a burned the Windows Vista/7 recovery disc, created your own Windows 7 recovery disc, or made a bootable Windows Vista/7 recovery thumb drive.

To boot from your disc/USB:

1. Insert your bootable repair disc/USB drive

2. Reboot your PC

3. When your BIOS is loading (if you have a brand-name PC, this is usually when you can see the brand’s logo), press the key that loads the boot options menu (this is usually displayed as an option on the screen and is typically the ESC/F8 key)

5. Arrow down to “CD-ROM Drive” / “DVD-ROM Drive” / “Removable Media” / “USB Media” and press Enter

The recovery software will take some time to load:

6. Now select your default keyboard layout:

7. After the software detects your installation of Windows, click Next:

What Can You Do with a Repair Disc?

A repair disc cannot be used to reinstall Windows but can perform many repair tasks. Here is just a small list of what you can do with a repair disc:

Startup Repair
System Restore
System Image Recovery
Windows Memory Diagnostic
Command Prompt

The most commonly used function (for me at least) is the Startup Repair. I use this when I get an error message like “NTLDR Missing”, “Unable to boot” etc. The startup repair checks the MBR, GPT etc for common errors and repairs them.

If you cannot boot into Windows because of corrupted settings, a virus etc, then you may find using a previously-created System Restore point will help you get back to Windows.

If you created a system image using Backup and Restore, you can use it to completely restore your computer to a previous state.

The memory diagnostic is used to check for bad memory sectors (more about the memory diagnostic tool.)

Finally, the command prompt can do (almost) anything the full command prompt can do while using Windows. This can be very useful to run tools like chkdsk to find out why your hard drive is suddenly not working.

For what functions have you used a system repair disc?