It provides the means for administrators to perform a limited range of tasks using a command-line interface.

Its primary function is to enable administrators to recover from situations where Windows does not boot as far as presenting its graphical user interface.

The recovery console is used to provide a way to access the hard drive in an emergency through the command prompt.

However, the latter option is much more risky than the former one because it requires that the computer can boot to the point that NTLDR loads, or else the Recovery Console will not work at all.

No protocol stacks are loaded, so there is no way to connect to a shared folder on a remote computer as implied.