A. A. The choice is hard coded into NT and therefore cannot be removed, however you can remove the functionality of what it does.
Several sets of configuration information are stored in NT, the current configuration and one or more sets of old configuration that are known to work. What NT does in the registry is to point to the current configuration and also a link to one of the other sets. It is possible to change the link to the last known good config, thus pressing space at bootup will have no effect.
- Start the registry editor (regedit.exe)
- Move to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\Select (if you look at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM you can see the control sets)
- Double click on LastKnownGood and change to whatever value Current is
- Click OK and exit the registry editor
The option "Press Spacebar for last known good config" has caused lots of trouble, because of use with the Novell IntranetWare for Windows NT, which is unavaiable after restoring the last known good configuration; the same is true for any self created hardware profile.
It has been found that an interesting solution for this and other related system crashes: Save the whole registration key from the regedit (interestingly, this method doesn't work with the more detailed regedt32) as a script file named for example save.reg, and if a system is damaged a simple double click on this executable file regenerates the whole configuration without loss of information. Moreover you can zip this file - usually as large as 5 MBytes - to a volume of nearly 500 KBytes. With these tools in hand it is possible, to restore a crashed system from disk with rdisk and afterwards regenerate it with the registry file to the last known standard.
