What is your favorite boot disk utility ?

[The-One]

I think I like BartPE and Hirens the best but I want to hear from some of the pros and what I should try out. I really want to hear from [H] guys and gals with high post counts and lots of years under there belt. Other Pros are welcome of course. Thanks for the input ahead of time. I'm really just wondering if there is a CD that I should be using that I'm not.

 

[Nenu]

I gave the Ultimate Boot CD a shot the other day.
Once installed, it collects the info for your system and compiles a bootable Tools / Anti Malware CD for your system.

Before booting into the Windows console, you can run basic diagnosis tools.
Once booted, you can browse the web with Firefox to find the cure if your OS bit the dust, scan for virii / rootkits /malware, recover your accounts...
Very handy.

(As joe pointed out this may very well be warez, I will be deleting it)

 

[Joe Average]

UBCD4Win will let you build a very customized bootable CD. Hiren's, even though it's loaded with all sorts of goodies, is also a warez product as almost all the goodies are commercial products so... I wouldn't go around talking much about it here at this forum as that's prohibited.

I've built several custom UBCD4Win discs, and even transferred them to USB sticks using PE2USB which is cool. My primary tool would be that stuff on a USB stick, but in a situation where you have hardware that doesn't support booting from a USB device (older machines) then the CD is the backup. Also, putting the UBCD4Win content on a USB stick makes it far easier to update the AV signatures for the portable versions of NOD32 that I use (custom made myself using Thinstall).

Fun stuff...

Also, note that the Ultimate Boot CD and UBCD4Win are similar but not quite the same end results.

The best CD you're not using is the one you haven't built yet, customized just for you, with the tools you specifically use the most and trust. Simple.

As for high post counts and years of experience... been working on PCs nearly daily for since the mid-70's, and this is my fourth account at this forum. I joined it 3 weeks after it went live many many years ago... so take that as you wish.

 

[devman]

I use UBCD for low level stuff. For high level I use a bootable Vista PE usb stick (you can also put it on a CD or DVD). You can build one custom from your own installed environment using Winbuilder and it even throws Knoppix on as well so you get a boot menu to choose from Vista PE or Knoppix (which is what I used before and still use).

Knoppix itself is great, I pretty much used it daily when I was a pc technician

www.vistape.net

I stay away from Hiren's and miniPE because they both contain warez.

 

[ZzBloopzZ]

I use UBCD for low level stuff. For high level I use a bootable Vista PE usb stick (you can also put it on a CD or DVD). You can build one custom from your own installed environment using Winbuilder and it even throws Knoppix on as well so you get a boot menu to choose from Vista PE or Knoppix (which is what I used before and still use).

Knoppix itself is great, I pretty much used it daily when I was a pc technician

www.vistape.net

I stay away from Hiren's and miniPE because they both contain warez.

That's pretty neat. Do you find that it works great with all newer SATA systems, since vista has native AHCI support? I have a older UBCD4Win disc about a year old, works perfectly for all older systems but does not work on some newer systems. :c(

 

[devman]

That's pretty neat. Do you find that it works great with all newer SATA systems, since vista has native AHCI support? I have a older UBCD4Win disc about a year old, works perfectly for all older systems but does not work on some newer systems. :c(

Worked fine on my personal system (see sig) and that's got a nforce 750i in it.

 

[nessus]

I use a VistaPe build with my favorite UBCD4Win tools in it set up for boot from USB.

Only thing I don't have working under VistaPE is mouting ISOs as a CD.

I used the unsupported ISO mounting tool from MSDN for that using BartPE/UBCD4Win. I miss being able to connect to my server based ISO library, not that I need it often.