I got to work today and booted my macbook. Having forgotten that I switched it to boot Windows the night before, I didn’t hold the Option key to boot into Mac OS 10.5 (for work needs. I wouldn’t dare keep it otherwise). I wasn’t paying much attention to what was going on with the screen as I was in the middle of a meeting, but I got back to it after about 5 minutes and came upon the above scene unfolding on my laptop. It was vaguely familiar; Paul Thurrott reminded me later that it’s an offshoot of the Windows Recovery Environment which is now integrated into Windows 7 as opposed to being contained solely on the installation DVD.

The fact that the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE) would be contained in the Windows 7 installation is nothing new; reviewers covered this after their reviews went live on Windows 7 keynote day at PDC. However, no one has actually seen it work, so here I am.

Yes, it actually works.

In my case, my instance of build 6801 died on an “unknown bugcheck: 12b” which led to WinRE being launched. The recovery mechanism checked for issues, subsequently asked me if I’d like to use system restore to roll back to the last working point, rolled back, and presented me with full details of all of its scans (some of which you’ll see in my quick-n-dirty BlackBerry shots). After all of that, it rebooted and voila, Windows 7!

I didn’t lose Rafael’s BlueBadging either, though Rafael did lose his mind over how irritating this feature might become for techs.

Catch the remaining three pics after the break, and feel free to leave your thoughts on whether you think this will or will not be useful to home users, nerd users, sysadmins, etc.

If you’re with the Windows Error Reporting team, please check your error reports for this one. 4th pic contains the most relevant information.

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