I don’t know how useful this actually is but I thought I would share it with you guys anyway.
You seem to like useless information… Right??
This trick threw me for a loop. I was watching a junior admin install Windows Vista from a CD and he turned to me smirked and said
Want to see something cool?
I shrugged my shoulders and he hit a key combination and brought up a command prompt over the gui that was installing Vista….
I said “Whaaaaat??”
We went back and forth like that for a little bit until I asked him what he uses it for. He shrugged his shoulders this time and he didn’t know but he likes that it makes him look cool. You can open a game of Pinball or Solitaire during an install.
Sound appealing to anyone?
That’s what I call multi-tasking :) So Shift + F10 will get you to the command prompt during an install like the shot below. It works on XP as well.
It only works from the GUI portion and not the white text on blue background parts. I googled it and saw some speculation on using it to inject drivers or folders during your install. But isn’t that what Nlite is for?? :) Microsoft themselves said the following:
In some cases, it may be helpful to have access to a command prompt during GUI-mode Setup for the purposes of troubleshooting, copying drivers, starting and stopping services, starting tools such as Task Manager, or other for other needs.To gain access to a command prompt during GUI-mode Setup, press SHIFT+F10.
Do you use this? Did you know about this? Why didn’t you tell me? Sheeeesh!
Posted in 
Tags: 
Actually, I know it for a long time… I use it to run Solitaire or Pinball while the setup install the system. that’s what I call: use your time efficiently :))
YaronM (www.yaronmaor.net)
@Yaron – thats one of the coolest things i heard all week! Mind you its early in the week but thats awesome. I need to go do a manual install just to give her a shot!
I would make you our Admin of The week if we had our swag to give-a-way. Soon enough and if you hit me with your email address i will get you something as soon as we get AtA stuff in!
Send them tips over this way or volunteer to do a little guest blogging!
Thanks for the tips ;)
Coooool. Uuuuuuseless. :)
I learned about this one in my Vista support training, and it saved my butt numerous times. It’s handy if you can’t boot to windows, and still need to salvage parts of the hard drive. I used it to resize a partition or two, then use robocopy to move all of my important data. Although I think the solitaire solution is much better!
Very useful, you can also use SHIFT+10 and NUSRMGR.CPL to bypass the admin password when use the repair feature of Windows install CD, works in Windows 2003/XP/Vista
Greetings
I use this sometimes to edit/read the sysprep.inf with notepad in sysprep’d ghost images.
I know about it for at least 2 years. I use this trick to even watch movies (albeit most of the times without sound – drivers not installed yet) with mplayer during setup.
Very creative! That is a new one.
[...] Have you seen this post on opening a command prompt during a windows install? Using this you can start a recovery install jump to a command prompt and run: [...]