Quite often your new or used computer did not come with a Windows CD. One way is to create a bootable Windows 7 CD or DVD. Though a Repair Disk is no replacement for a Factory or OEM disk, it does have many uses.

To create your own repair disk before something happens, just click on the “Start” icon on the lower left corner of the screen. Type in “System Repair” in the Search Box. Click on “Create a System Repair Disk” from the list.

Create the disk…

Now just for fun, test out the disk. Put it in your DVD drive and reboot. You may have to change the BIOS boot section to have the CD/DVD drive as the primary boot device.

Once you boot to the CD or DVD (I used both for this test), you will need to select you keyboard layout (US for most of you) and then a new page appears.

Make sure the radio button “Use recovery tools that can help fix…” is selected and click on “Next”. You will be brought to the list of repair choices I mentioned below.

When the disk boots you will get a list of system recovery options such as those listed below.
•    Startup repair
•    System Restore
•    System image recovery
•    Windows memory diagnostic
•    Command prompt

The options shown above will depend on which version of Window 7 you are using. Windows 7 Home only offers me “System Restore” and “Windows memory diagnostic”. I also created a couple of these disks in my various computers, You can boot from say your Windows Home DVD on your Windows Ultimate machine but the only thing that would run was the memory testing tool. There is also a difference in the disks if your version of Windows 7 is 32 bit or 64 bit.

I won’t take the time to walk you through a repair, the important thing is that you create the disk and store it in a safe location with your other software.

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Until we meet again, have a virus free week!