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Can you recommend good (and not just any) free downloadable recovery CD?

Mostly for Microsoft, including various partition and disk tools etc

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But what Windows version? – random♦ Sep 26 '09 at 13:13
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closed as not constructive by random♦ Oct 24 '11 at 20:20

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4 Answers

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Ultimate Boot CD for Windows aka UBCD4Win

A bootable recovery CD that contains software used for repairing, restoring, or diagnosing almost any computer problem. Sort of Windows version of the Ultimate Boot CD.

It's based on Bart's PE (a Windows "pre-install" environment CD, basically a simple Windows® XP booted from CD) and have a multi-boot system to launch other boot disks and many useful plug-ins built-in.

It includes network support and allows you the ability to modify NTFS volumes, recover deleted files, create new NTFS volumes, scan hard drives for viruses, etc.

List of tools (outdated)

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up vote 1 down vote

SysClone - a combination of the excellent SystemRescue CD and Clonezilla in a multiboot environment. available for USB and CD/DVD.

Tools included:

GNU Parted creates, resizes, moves, copies partitions, and filesystems (and more).

GParted GUI implementation using the GNU Parted library.

Partimage popular opensource disk image software which works at the disk block level

FSArchiver flexible archiver that can be used as both system and data recovery software

File systems tools (for Linux and Windows filesystems): format, resize, and debug an existing partition of a hard disk

Ntfs3g: enables read/write access to MS Windows NTFS partitions.

sfdisk saves / restores partition table (and more).

Testdisk tool to check and undelete partition, supports reiserfs, ntfs, fat32, ext2/3 and many others

Memtest+ to test the memory of your computer (first thing to test when you have a crash or unexpected problems)

Network tools (Samba, NFS, ping, nslookup, ...) to backup your data across the network

SysClone is free, the website is in German, the software all English.

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Brilliant -- this one will combine 4 other boot disks :-) – Chris_K Sep 26 '09 at 15:52
While my German is good enough to read the site, is there an "auf Englisch" option once running the actual disk -- or are the apps all german as well? Not that it matters much to me, but some of the team are english only. – Chris_K Sep 26 '09 at 16:02
heh - guess I should've noticed your last line – Chris_K Sep 26 '09 at 16:46
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up vote 0 down vote

TestDisk -- there is also an assist software.

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Debian Live. The non-GUI version of it is very useful, because it can be used to fix file system, copy files, wipe disks etc even on machine that for some reason can't sustain desktop environment.

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