| Several times I’ve been called upon at a moment’s notice to troubleshoot a misbehaving PC system either at work or at a friend’s or relative’s home. Being the “go to” guy for these sorts of problems is both a curse and a blessing, but I guess that is besides the point.
One tool that I have found to be valuable beyond compare is the Ultimate Boot CD (UBCD). This compilation of software has just about everything you need to diagnose hard to find low level problems, and also some other tools that every PC technician should have available. |
It has been around for a long time, but I still know a lot of techs who don’t know about it. Ultimate Boot CD includes memory checkers, CPU stress testers, system information tools, boot managers and tools for hard drives, partitions, password resets, and more. For a full list, check out the UBCD page.
Typically, this is burned onto an ISO and you boot using a CD. But isn’t that so “last year”? Putting it onto a USB Drive makes it much more portable and it can sit side by side with your other portable tech tools.
The directions on how to do this are courtesy of pendrivelinux:
That’s it! You now have a bootable USB drive. Any machine you wish to boot with this drive must be set to boot from USB, so this might mean a trip into the boot menu.
After booting from the drive you’ll see the UBCD menu:
Some great things I’ve used the UBCD to do:
So give it a shot if you are the type of person who is always called upon to fix people’s PCs!
Dave is an IT Manager by day and technology consultant by night. He is interested in all things internet but is specifically interested in system administration, network security, history, and backpacking. He lives near Philadelphia with his family. See his blog @ systembash.com.
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Filed Under: Cool Software Apps ¦ How-To
Tags: diagnostic, repair, usb drive
It’s been a while, I am really...
i’m not a fan of ubcd. yeah it has tons of really useful utilities, but i find that there is so many redundant applications and many times much older versions than the current versions.
i find that in theory, ubcd is a friggin great idea. but in practice, it’s really hard for them to keep everything up to date. that is of course if you roll with your own custom rescue cd and hand select what you want on it.
i much prefer to have a bunch of utilities with me that i know are updated and work well. of course all tested and verified before i work on my client’s machines.
what do you guys think?
I agree that some of the software packages are not up to date. But, unless you have the skills or time to roll your own, they all work pretty well to do the job. If I have problems with one, usually one of the other ones works well enough to get the job done!
Do we need this if the UBCD alreay support USB (although experimental)?
Take from: http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/download.html
What I’d really love to have is actually a UBCD4Win on my USB stick.
You are a life saver. Just what I need! You’ve been Dugged.
A practical method, but dude, I would definitely embed more stuff on that stick, OS related and file-system tools are always on demand. Virus and spyware scanners come in handy at times when called for a PC problem.
Not to mention that as a tech myself, i find waaaay too many users that have computers that don’t have a bios that supports booting from USB. They’re a lot more common than you might realize. A knoppix live cd with diagnostic tools or a PE cd might be a tad more useful.
Very few computers will boot to a usb thumb drive.
This is pretty old news but not bad. Unfortunately, the one time I could have used this to be helpful, the PC’s BIOS wasn’t capable of booting from Linux.
But you can have some fun stealing passwords with this and wreaking havoc.
I love that you can put it on a thumb drive but unfortunately I have a lot of friends and family members with older computers that may be a little tough to get booting from a USB drive, the bootable CD is a great universal tool and although having it on a thumb drive may be handy having it on a CD is absolutely crucial.
quite practical