Emergency Repair Disk
Encyclopedia
For information about generic boot/recovery discs, see Recovery disc
A Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
Emergency Repair Disk (ERD) is a specially formatted bootable (for some Windows operating systems) media made by some Windows operating system
Operating system
An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...
s that contains information about a particular Windows installation, first seen in Windows NT 4.0
Windows NT 4.0
Windows NT 4.0 is a preemptive, graphical and business-oriented operating system designed to work with either uniprocessor or symmetric multi-processor computers. It was the next release of Microsoft's Windows NT line of operating systems and was released to manufacturing on 31 July 1996...
. This disk can be used to restore a computer to a bootable state if the registry
Windows registry
The Windows Registry is a hierarchical database that stores configuration settings and options on Microsoft Windows operating systems. It contains settings for low-level operating system components as well as the applications running on the platform: the kernel, device drivers, services, SAM, user...
or other fundamental system components are damaged due to a malware infection or anything else that could make the operating system unbootable.
Windows 2000 uses what is called an Emergency Repair Disk but it is not bootable. Windows XP uses something very similar to the Windows 2000 Emergency Repair Disk, but it is called Automated System Recovery
Automated System Recovery
Automated System Recovery is a feature of the Windows XP operating system that can be used to simplify recovery of a computer's system or boot volumes. ASR consists of two parts: an automated backup, and an automated restore...
.