Why you HAVE to have this tool in your arsenal

Heres my story of how the FREE Ultimate Boot CD has saved my data.

May 29th, 2006 at 11:58am — Comments: (0) — By: Jonathan Danylko — Tags: Tools

Last week (or last post, depending on how you look at it), you may have noticed that posting was trimmed down a bit (actually, A LOT) :-).

On Thursday, my wife called me at work and said "the computer won't startup." I was worried.

I asked, "What does it say on the screen?"

"Please use chkdsk to see if you can recover the disk."

My heart sank. I said I would be home soon to check it out.

After thinking about this all day at work because recently (as in last month), I made a backup of my development environment. Lately, being so busy, I haven't backed up my latest and greatest tools I've developed as well as some personal web sites I was working on.

When I got home, I started looking it over. I rebooted twice (I think) before I came to the realization that my hard drive went South on me. Hey, I understood it was an older 80GB hard drive. It was bound to happen.

When I was looking through my utilities, I came across one CD I haven't used in a while: The Ultimate Boot CD. The version I had burned was version 3.3. The newest version out was 3.4. So I immediately downloaded the ISO image. Not only is the disk a valuable tool for Linux or Windows, it comes at a great price...FREE!

The Ultimate Boot CD has a ton of utilities distributed into the following categories:

• Mainboard Tools
• Hard Disk Tools
• Filesystem Tools
• Other Tools
• User-Defined Tools
• DOS/Linux Boot Disks

with the following additional menu items:

• Boot first hard disk
• Boot second hard disk
• Drop to Console

Bottom line, the Ultimate Boot CD has saved my data. When I booted it and used the menu, I did some analysis of the disk for an hour. I found out the MBR (Master Boot Record) was damaged. It didn't know which drive to run or boot to.

I went to the Partition tools and ran Ranish's Partition Manager. Ranish's Partition Manager immediately told me what drives were allocated and which ones were extended or logical partitions. After looking over the map it created, it had an option for writing the correct MBR to the drive. I rebooted and Voila! Windows started.

To the makers of the Ultimate Boot CD, thank you, Thank You, THANK YOU! At one point, I was even looking for Windows 2000 boot disks to recover my drive. Hah! Didn't need 'em. :-)

This utility even spawned a Windows Boot CD version, which I didn't even know it existed until AFTER my PC was up and running. Its appropriately named the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows. Catchy, isn't it?

Oh...and I immediately started backing up my data.