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here, http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/ download, put to usb media... use BIOS to set usb and/or dvd to boot before the hdd. then boot and fix MBR then roll back updates. you can ever use the boot cd to replace the bad files using the copy on your boot dvd (just google the guides i'm lazy)

If you did not buy a drive with a bundled disk cloning utility, The Ultimate Boot CD http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/ contains some free tools that will do the job.

UBCD has both, http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

...if you don't plan to actually install. Alternatively, go download the Ultimate Boot CD and boot to the GUI for Parted Magic, which contains a browser, a command line tool, and a whole bunch of hard disk drive diagnostic and recovery tools, among other things. It's also useful for a bunch of other recovery and diagnosis stuff that doesn't use Linux, so it's good to have around for when the computer has a problem. I use it probably daily at work.

That looks almost exactly like The Ultimate Boot CD with the addition of a few pirated programs. I suggest having a copy of UBCD around - it's handy, free, and easy to obtain.

I've found the UBCD -- Ultimate Boot CD to be quite useful.

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

It does come in handy, includes many of the necessary tools to determine HDD end of life etc.

It certainly isn't perfect, but I am amazed nobody has mentioned it yet in the discussion. Obviously real tools are on my bench, but when the poster specifically asked for software....this is the easiest and most broad spectrum solution.

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

This is pretty much the best free tool there is to test and diagnose a system. It also has a bunch of tools for partitioning and the like as well as password resetting.

I've had this in my arsenal for many years now, it's a great tool.

Here are a few tools I keep on hand for the less catastrophic problems:
-Knoppix - live linux boot, can mount NTFS and flash drives and has a number of standard linux tools
-Gparted - excellent graphical partition tool - useful in setting up a staging disk and in copying partitions, but it's unhappy if your NTFS drive is severely busted
-Ultimate Boot CD - This disc has many tools (filesystem, hardware, etc) you shouldn't be without

My recent drive crash (with backups a month old, oops) involved copying one partition with ntfsclone from the gparted disk (manually run to ignore errors). Chkdsk and some other tinkering was enough to restore the clone. In the end, the other partition required commercial software which worked despite my scepticism.

First: Get this. If you got a rootkit, this should find it. unless it's something zero day. If it finds stuff, then reboot back into windows and run something like Malwarebytes Anti Malware or Spybot Search and Destroy for a few days (a week or two with Spybot. They only update on Wednesdays) to get it completely cleaned out. Windows Defender also works good here and adds realtime scannning to the mix.

Second: Like someone above posted, Check for Drives Running PIO in Device Manager. If you find any, run the resetDMA Script someone above posted. ALso Check your BIOS for changed settings. Dying CMOS batteries can cause a lot of havok with DMA settings depening on the BIOS defaults.

Third: Test Hardware. Contrary to Popular belief here, Windows NT Kernel Failures, *Especially Blue Screens* Are usually caused by either a Hardware failure or a Driver failure. If it's been running great and then BAM, check hardware first. The Ultimate Boot CD has all the tests you need. Test for RAM errors and test your Hard drive using the Drive Specific diagnostic program.

Forth: if all else fails after this, backtrack. If you installed something recently, and the machine started acting weird afterwards. uninstall it and see what happens. System restore (if it actually works) also comes in handy.

Finally, a Tip. Stay The Hell away from "optimizing" software. Just about every Registry optimizer I've ever seen screws up more then it's worth. Speed boosters tend to slow things down in the long run or lock windows, and any disk optimizer basically does nothing different than defrag C:. Even Microsoft's Registry and cleaning offerings on their onecare site has screwed me over in some cases, and if they can't optimize their own OS... Just say no to them.

Computers don't "just crash" any more. Even my Windows machines runs for months these days. Linux doesn't seem to have as many bad driver problems, so I'd guess you have a hardware problem most likely the memory. Make a copy of the Ultimate Bootable CD and run Memtest and maybe the disk checker for whatever brand disk you have. Good luck.

A simple format might not remove it, as a simple format just wipes the tables, and not the entire drive. But a utility like KillDisk would absolutely wipe it, and you can get KillDisk for free with the Ultimate Boot CD.

Somehow I doubt the computrace software would survive being overwritten 12 times with random ones and zeros.

Actually the Internet File sharing Pirates have an answer to that, it is called Tiny XP. It is the bare minimum you need from XP to play games on it.

Microsoft has Windows PE, of which BartPE and Reatogo are based on provided you have a legal Windows XP SP2 or higher CD-ROM to use to create the smaller version of XP on for just the basics. They are what the Ultimate Boot CD is based on and there exists an option to install that to the hard drive instead of the standard XP. I've used it and it does not even ask you for a valid CD-Key to install BartPE or boot from it. You just have to own a copy of Windows XP SP2 or higher to use it, while it works with XP SP1 and under, I wouldn't recommend it. I even heard it can use Windows Vista for a PE version of Windows, but I never tried that.

It is either BartPE or some variation, or wait for ReactOS to at least get a beta build. ReactOS 0.3.5 came out in June 30th 2008, but Slashdot seems to be ignoring it and BartPE and variants. ReactOS is an open source OS based on WINE that is being written to run at least Windows XP/2003 code under it and use XP/2003 drivers. It is not ready for prime time yet.

Flakey memory is a common undiagnosed cause of system instability (along with bad power supplies). Testing the memory should be the first task performed after buying it from a place with a good return policy.

But I have to agree with the previous posters about the power required. If you have a bunch of 300Gb it might be worth it,but less than 100Gb you'll end up wasting more than you gain. What I usually like to do with them is if I have an extra slot on the HD IDE I put the smaller drive as a dedicated swap. Takes some of the wear and tear off the main drive and gives you a nice little speed boost as well. But that is my 02c,YMMV

Steveha..
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/
http://www.ubcd4win.com/
Both have excellent tools on them, including some UPDATABLE AV kits.

If your Windows XP system is BSOD-ing you're going to have to buy more RAM anyways. I've yet to see a BSOD in XP where the culprit wasn't a bad stick of RAM. Doesn't mean it this isn't the first time though so I would download The Ultimate Boot CD and run a few of the memory tests.

Recovery mode from a Windows XP CD isn't even needed; just boot from cd a utility that can edit the boot.ini directly from linux or freedos. http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/ is your friend.

How could people be missing an opportunity to promote the wonderfulness that is the Ultimate Boot CD 4 Windows. You can even put the Ultimate Boot CD image on there. I have a disc that can boot into either. If you are opposed to the MS Windows version, or don't have an extra XP license laying around, the Ultimate Boot CD has the wonderful utility called Test Disk by Christophe Grenier. It can recover MBRs and potentially rebuild tables and/or indexes for crashed drives.

hmmm I actually recommend in some situations people installing Linux to do so on a second hard drive...specially if they are already dual-booting the first. Or for security reasons. Easy enough to boot to with this great boot cd .

As far as a dual boot with multiple hard drives, I've found it easier when dealing with 3+ installs (or even 2 if one is windows)to setup grub on the 2nd harddrive which will allow for kernel selections, but not mess with the 1st harddrives MBR. Just use something like an ultimate boot cd when you want to boot the 2nd hd. This will allow some lea way with flashing the MBR if something terrible should occur, as well as, allowing your pre-installed OEM to play nice as a fail-safe.

Also, this can add an element of security or for those paranoid downloaders out there a "Hey here's my harddrive, enjoy!" alternative with the privacy of a 2nd, or 3rd OS.

Get the UBCD or UBCD4Win for some good tools. Particularly, UBCD4Win includes several freeware and open source tools for file recovery. My favorite happens to be testdisk, followed closely by Restoration. (Make sure, if you use the UBCD4Win, you build these tools into ISO. Just follow the directions at the site, it is real easy.)

Hardly a prime example. Google slipstreaming and check out this site while you're at it http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

• Unpacking from box and plugging in.
• Setup of user profile and intro stuff that WinXP takes you through
• Close all of the stupid pop-ups I am inundated with from crapware
• Removal of crapware (~30-45 minutes and a few reboots)
• Installation of Anti-virus (AVG, Avast!, take your pick)
• Installation of firewall (ZoneAlarm is my fave)
• Installation of The GIMP (and associated programs)
• Installation of OpenOffice.org (and, likewise, an utter destruction of MS Works and the eval version of Office)
• Installation of Firefox and Thunderbird and associated extensions
• Installation of the several games I like to play (Morrowind, many Valve products from Steam, Popcap games now loaded through Steam, NFS:U2, etc.)
• Last but not least, update all of the above software. WinXP currently sits at around 160MB of compressed downloads, only then to be installed once the d/l is finished.

You could always use the Ultimate Boot CD.

A couple people have asked about that. I'll probably put up another wiki with PC Clinic specifically in mind. But here's some information to whet your appetite.

Before each clinic, I hop online and download the latest versions of AVG Antivirus Free Edition and Spybot Search & Destroy.

I also download all the updates. You can get AVG's updates here. Spybot's patches are on their download page.

Finally, I grab AVG's individual virus removal tools. (I haven't had cause to use them individually yet, but it's best to be prepared. :)

I throw those all onto a CD, and burn ten copies. These copies float around the service lab, and eventually all disappear. :)

I also grab the CD image of the latest Ultimate Boot CD, and burn a few copies of that. (Grab the Full version. The SMART tools on the INSERT system are extremely helpful.)

The Ultimate Boot CD (a bit old now, is there a better alternative usable with a USB memory stick?)

a Linux Live CD

Its not exactly designed for thumb drives, but its saved my hide numerous times:
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

Im pretty sure that if you can boot of a thumb drive, it wouldnt take too much to make this work.

I have a copy of the latest version with me at all times, in my wallet, on a mini-cdr.

All freeware tools, including a full fledged linux (Insert linux i think its called),
dozens of msdos utils, net stuff, iirc there were bios flashers in there too at some point.

I keep two disks with me in the glove box at all time - Knoppix, and Ultimate Boot CD. Knoppix comes in handy when staying with relatives over the holidays - running Knoppix live tends to be faster & easier than trying to use their bloated, slow, comet cursor-laden WinXP box. Ultimate Boot CD - its great for the hard disk utilities alone.

I'll second that one. Every once in awhile when the CEO loses his post-it note with his new password on it, it pays to be able to reset it quickly and painlessly. I have been using that disc for a couple of years and I love it.

I usually keep a copy of the UBCD around to test out SMART failures, flaky memory, etc. and fix boot problems and other miscellaneous junk.

Apart from those, I also have to give the nod to Knoppix or the STD Knoppix for other types of recovery.

Ultimate Boot CD
Knoppix
Damn Small Linux

get Ultimate boot CD. It has AVG, f-prot, McAfee and Avast, as well as a heap of other useful tools.

About half of us used a variety of bootable Linux distros such as Knoppix and SLAX to perform diagnosis and recovery. Sometimes, the best way is the traditional way - the command line.

To restore your master boot sector and regain access to your windows install:

Boot off a DOS floppy that includes the FDISK program. If you don't have such a disk, get on your windows machine at work (or at your friend's house) and make one. Once booted, type this command:

FDISK /MBR

That's it! You can now restart your computer and boot right into windows.

Alternatively, you could make use of a generic floppy bootloader to gain access to both systems. Gujin is a good one, IMO, but it takes a bit of setting up. You can skip that step if you want by downloading the ISO of The Ultimate Boot CD and burning it (again, at work). You can boot right off that CD, select Gujin, and use it to boot any OS on your system.

That should get you back on track, assuming you haven't already reformatted and started over.

Now, on to more general issues:

Dual-booting is generally considered an advanced technique. That is to say, it is the sort of thing that a very computer savvy (not windows-savvy, but more generally computer savvy) user should do. It is not the sort of thing that someone who is new to Linux should do. Unfortunately, it is exactly what everyone who is new to linux wants to do, since they don't want to give up windows and also don't want to buy a completely separate computer for Linux. This is very problematic.

Advanced users, in general, already know how to do things like restore the master boot sector if it was damaged, make use of various bootloaders, backup all of their data in a recoverable form, overcome some of the more technical partitioning issues, etc. That is probably why you got flamed...you are attempting advanced-user stuff but seem to be making beginning-user mistakes.

Did you know, for example, that if you partition your hard drive and put your linux partition too many cylinders away from sector zero, you might not be able to boot linux at all? It depends on your hardware, of course, but partitioning problems like that always frustrate beginners. The only real way to address them is to do a lot of study upfront.

Like I said before, however, new Linux users don't generally want to do a lot of study upfront. They want it to just work. This is a fine desire, but unfortunately industry realities prevent some of the more advanced activities (such as dual-booting) from 'just working.'

Anyway, best of luck to you.

The Ultimate Boot CD is a nice collection of memory, CPU, partition, filesystem, benchmarking, and BIOS utilities, and the "full" version of the UBCD contains INSERT as well as all of the other stuff. Quite a nice collection of utilities and diagnostic software on one CD.

BTW, anyone have a good recovery utility for a fubar'd EXT3 drive?

Have you tried Knoppix? It seems to be able handle problem drives better than most OS's.
Last resort, get the Ultimate boot CD full version and run the program Recovery is possible.

DOS is still used on most diagnostic boot disks for the major hard disk makers, many BIOS upgrades, numerous low-level diagnostics. While almost everyone has access to MS-DOS 7.10 (Win9x DOS Final) it cannot be freely distributed. I'd be happy if Microsoft released it as a free release, but that's unlikely at this point. Most freely released diagnostics use Caldera's DR-DOS.

Scott Cooper
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/ is worth checking out if you haven't had the pleasure already.

I work with spyware infected systems every day, and I have never found a "rootkit" on one. But there is some really nasty stuff out there. Lots of spyware installs itsself as a service, but that is easy enough to get rid of, just use "msconfig". The trickier ones, however, install themselves as drivers. These require manual regedit hacking which is a major PITA.

The most effective method that I have found to get rid of spyware on an infected system, by the way, is to boot from a live Windows bootable CD to delete all the crappy spyware directories from c:\Program Files, then go into c:\windows and c:\windows\system32, sort the files by date, and delete the newest ones that look suspicious. Write these filenames down and remove them from the registry when you reboot.

UBCD and UBCD4win are your friends. I usually unpack the ISO's and add a bunch of other windows utilities, service packs, virus and spyware defs so that I have fewer CDs to carry around. (you never know when you'll have to fix something on dialup)

5. A common area with with a whole bunch of different ram testers.

It may be that I'm more budget-conscious than others, but I think ram testers are a load of crap. They're expensive and quickly become obsolete as new types of ram comes out.

A better solution, IMHO, is a couple known-good barebones PCs. For any modern computer you only need one supporting SDRAM and one supporting DDR. Neither machine needs a hard drive; just a bootable CD-Rom drive with a bootable memtest86 disk.

This setup also doubles as a generic parts tester; you can plug any pci card, hard drive, cd drive, etc. into these barebones machines to verify failure. I use an ultimate boot cd in each machine. It comes with memtest , hard drive diagnostic tools, and a bunch of other diagnostic apps.

Yes, I managed to forget the link - here it is: Ultimate Boot CD

I have been using the Ultimate Windows Boot CD http://www.ubcd4win.com/ for a couple of years now. It is built on Barts PE and adds a lot of freeware to the mix. Also for troubleshooting I use a Dos boot CD http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/that has a tone on software for troubleshooting and fixing as well as a way to shell out to Linux.

So to me the floppy still has a place in modern computing.

I REALLY want to kill my floppy drive. I hate it. Floppy disks are so incredibly unreliable. They are corrupted on the whim. Hell, even putting a floppy next to a cell phone can provide sufficient magnetic field to erase its contents.

However, I just built a new set of servers for my company, and we had to put floppy drives on all of them. The BIOS on the motherboard we used supported booting to a USB device, but if you didn't want to boot to it, it wasn't recognized. In order to load the SATA RAID drivers for Win2k3, we had to have a FDD in the machine. It sucks. Also, recently, I made a customization of the Ultimate Boot CD and I needed every friggin' floppy disk that I wanted to put on there, because there's no easy (and free) way to make an image of a boot floppy without using the actual disk. I had copies of all the compressed images, but since they were compressed, I had to copy them onto a floppy, then re-create a non-compressed image using FloppyImage. (There are commercial programs out there, but who wants to pay $30 for WinImage to create 5 images when FloppyImage is free)

So what's the solution? Will motherboard BIOS manufacturers just standardize the practice of putting NON-BOOTABLE USB support in the BIOS? I can fit every image to every floppy disk I ever owned onto one 512MB USB drive. What does it take?

A while back I wanted to check the integrity of a hard drive and realized that the hard drive utilities were on floppy. I have long since abandoned the floppy drive in my long upgraded machine. So I searched around for a bootable cd image that had such utils and found this. If you ever need one of those floppy utils, most likely they will be found on the Ultimate boot CD.

1. Buy 3 250GB EIDE or SATA HD's very cheaply.
2. Plug them into your cheap linux PC (with at least a 400Watt powersupply). If EIDE then make sure each drive is on its own (master) channel. If your BIOS supports "hardware" RAID, disable it.
3. Use a low-level drive diagnostic fitness test to burn the drives in so you can be sure they won't fail right away. A great tool for this is The Ultimate Boot CD, as well as the 'badblocks' linux util.
4. Assuming your 3 new drives are drives sdb, sdc, and sdd, with your bootdrive on sda (or hda), you should now partition each of them (instead of raiding the entire disk). I recommend creating one primary partition which is slightly smaller than the fullsize of the harddisk, such that if you buy a replacement drive of another brand and it isn't the EXACT same size, you won't be SOL when adding it. Mark the partition type as "FD", which is the raid autodetect type.
5. Verify that your kernel supports software RAID by checking that /proc/mdstat exists, or by checking for the multidisk "md" module in the output of "lsmod | grep md" after attempting to "modprobe md" and "modprobe raid5". If not supported, then... figure that out yourself.
6. Now the fun part (assuming mdadm's installed):
   mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level=5 --raid-devices=3 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdd1
   View the status of the raidset construction by cat'ing /proc/mdstat
7. Put a filesystem on the md0 device with mke2fs /dev/md0 (or mkreiserfs, or whatever)
8. Add a line to your /etc/fstab to automount your new raid array at /raid5 or wherever.
9. Oh, and if your distro doesn't automatically detect your array on reboot, you need to fix that by putting this in your init scripts somewhere:
   mdadm --assemble --scan

I'll second that, I've used DBAN a few times just in the last few days on old drives we're preparing to toss (finally retiring very old hardware).

I run it from the Ultimate Boot CD, http://www.ultimatebootcd.com, which has a ton of other diagnostic utilities on it, including the drive diag tools from all the major manufacturers. Extremely handy little CD to have around.

I use an external firewire enclosure and wipe to nuke drives that I ebay.

There's a self-booting CD diskzapper that looks like it ought to do the trick, though I have not used it.

Other posters mentioned Darik's Boot and Nuke as a floppy-boot solution.

The ultimate boot cd has a number of different disk wipers on it -- and a ton of other useful utilities on it. No self respecting geek should be without a copy.

The Recovery Is Possible bootable CD has a copy of wipe on it.

I wouldn't be suprised if Knoppix-STD had some erasing tool on it too, though I haven't checked.

Anyone know of a bootable image suitable for USB flash sticks?

There are three main bootable CDs (amonst a few others) that are in my software toolkit at all times: Knoppix, The Ultimate Boot CD, and The Ultimate Boot CD for Windows XP. All three are invaluable diag/repair tools.

I highly recommend downloading a copy of the Ultimate Boot Disc as well. This one's saved a couple of systems for me. It has a great collection of low level disk tools, including hard-drive manufacturor specific tools. I keep a copy of both the UBD and Knoppix by my computer at all times.