We’re having fun preparing our computers for the inevitable crashes. You should catch up by reading Parts One and Two of this column, printed in Newsletters 7 and 8 as linked above.

Microsoft gives us a fun little toy called the ERU, or Windows Emergency Recovery Utility. We use this to back up our hard drive in case of catastrophe. There are other ways to crashproof your PC, but I tend to prefer the ERU. Another recommended utility, called Cfg Backup, backs up your hard drive as advertised, but does not back up your Registry properly. I advise you to forget about this one and stick to ERU. ERU has its drawbacks (it limits the files you can back up, it won’t split files across floppy disks, and it requires another program, ERD, to function properly), but it does its job and does it right. That’s good enough for me.

Install the Windows Emergency Recovery Utility (ERU.EXE) from your Windows disk, located at \OTHER\MISC\ERU, into Windows. Install ERU by copying the files from your Windows CD into a folder titled ERU (the program comes in such a folder) and creating a shortcut to ERU on your desktop (right-click and hold it, drag it to your desktop, and choose "Create Shortcut Here"). Find ERD.EXE in the same CD folder and copy it to your hard disk as well.

Bug alert: ERU has a glitch that may cause it to disappear from your screen in mid-save. This is caused by Win 95's lack of CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files. Squash this bug by following the steps below. First, go into Windows Explorer, then into View, Options, and select "Show All Files." Make sure that "Hide MS-DOS File Extensions" is deselected. Click OK. (This makes "hidden" files such as these two visible.) Now, in the left pane of Explorer, click on C: (your boot drive), and look in the right pane for these two files. If they are, stop right there; you’re OK. If either of them are not there, you need to create a "dummy" file of each one for ERU to work properly. Do so by opening Notepad to a blank page. Select File, Save, and save the blank page to your C: directory. Make sure you have All Files (*.*) selected in the box next to Save As Type. Type the full title of your file, either CONFIG.SYS or AUTOEXEC.BAT. (Naturally, if you're missing both files, you'll need to create dummies for both.) Click Save. Close Notepad and start ERU. (Do NOT create dummy files for either AUTOEXEC.BAT or CONFIG.SYS if they already exist!) ERU doesn’t need the contents of either file to function, it just needs the comfort of knowing they exist. Don’t ask me why.

Run the program (double-click the shortcut) and choose Drive A: to back up your emergency files (insert a clean, formatted floppy disk). You can also run the program again and make a backup to your hard drive if you like. ERU will copy 12 files to your disk: ERE.EXE, ERD.INF, USER.DAT, SYSTEM.DAT, IO.SYS, COMMAND.COM, MSDOS.COM, PROTOCOL.INI, WIN.INI, SYSTEM.INI, AUTOEXEC.BAT, and CONFIG.SYS. The three .INI files are not vital to successfully restoring your hard drive with ERU, so if all of these files won't fit onto a single floppy, deselect SYSTEM.INI from the list of "optional" files to be copied and copy that file onto a separate floppy or onto your hard drive. Create a shortcut to ERU on your emergency startup disk by going into Notepad and typing the following:

Wasn’t that fun? By this time you’re ready to toss the whole machine out the window and go back to writing on chunks of slate with pieces of coal. Thankfully, there’s just one more thing to do, and that’s back up your CD drive. We’ll work on that next time, so breathe easy. (Win 98/ME users, your backup disks already contain the necessary CD drivers, you lucky rascals, as do the NT/2K/XP disks.) More info on using ERU can be found on the ERU Page of my site.