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...Uniformity of hardware is key to maintaining a sane corporate IT infrastructure. If every department has their own standard, it's impossible to troubleshoot Gateways, IBMs, Dells, HPs, and frankenbeasts in an 8-hour day. x86 legacy aside, there are too many variations in quality and configuration even across "compatible" systems to reliably troubleshoot issues on a daily basis.

I especially like Dell and IBM's basic troubleshooting kits. They seem to be pretty decent at working on a variety of their own machines, so one disk will support the Dimensions, Optiplexes, and Latitudes I see on a daily basis.

For more in-depth toubleshooting, a good DOS boot disk with Partition Magic is a good first step. For Win2k machines, the System Rescue CD is vital. Especially when you need to bood from a CD (no floppy workstations), mount the NTFS partition, try to fix it, and if you fail you can mount a samba drive and backup your data all without multiple reboots.

If every PC you used could boot from usb, that would work. I'm lucky that the PCs boot from CD on some sites. It is amazing how many 350mhz compaqs are out there still chugging away!

I carry a mepis CD, my data on a usb drive. I haven't yet found a networked PC that can not boot from CD in the work environment. I also carry knoppix-std, penguin-sleuth kit and DSL linx on a credit card CD.

I would rather have the USB drive for data, and I keep it fat32 so I can use whatever windows box I am near when I must print something.

System Rescue CD is a great utility to download and keep handy.

I have it on a mini CDRW. All the utils mentioned plus a minimum Xserver to run qt_parted.
Check out System Rescue CD They even have a PPC version.

I compare the price and license of the rescue CD to that of Ghost. I can give the CD away to anyone without a worry, I can't do that with Ghost.