A look at your boot disks

A vital part of your tool kit is your boot disks.

I carry in mine:

MS-DOS 6.22

Win95

Windows NT 3.51

Windows NT 4 Workstation

Windows NT 4 Server

Win98

Win98SE (Yes there is a difference it is in the fdisk Utility for large hard drives)

WinME (With the Fixed fdisk for drives over 32 gig)


Yes there are floppy versions for these 4 as well as CD’s.

Windows 2000 Workstation

Windows 2000 Server

Windows XP Home

Windows XP Professional


I also carry CD’s that are bootable for:

Windows XP

Windows Vista

I also have PC-DOS 6 and DR-DOS 5 both are basically MS-DOS but by IBM.

I also have disks for several Macintosh operating systems.


Now one thing to remember is floppy disks wear out and many systems now don’t even have floppies. So I use WinImage 7.0 to make images of the disks and have those images backed up to CD. This also allows me to on the fly recreate or make the boot disk I need while on site.

Also I have loaded on my laptop a copy of BartPE with all the common SATA / RAID and Network drivers. It allows me to make a standalone bootable Windows MiniXP installation on a Live Run CD. In that I have Anti-Vir by Avast and Avira. I have Norton Utilities, ERD Commander, Microsoft Crash Analyzer and several tools for rolling back Windows to previous settings as well as password and key recovery tools.

http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/

Avira also makes standalone bootable virus scanner cd images for free download as well as several other Antivirus manufacturers

http://www.avira.com/en/support/support_downloads.html

Microsoft has released Vista Boot CD’s and Windows 7 boot CD’s for access the recovery console tools that are like Windows XP but not included on the Windows CD’s.

http://neosmart.net/blog/2008/windows-vista-recovery-disc-download/

There are also several Linux distributions that are available for download that are Live CD and for system crashes and forensic recovery one I carry and works fairly well is RIP (Recover Is Possible) and is fairly good. I am sue there are other versions as well as instructions for making your own. I have also dabbled in making USB Flash drives bootable and incorporated into Live Run CD’s for holding up to date virus definitions for secure boot and recovery scenarios

Steven Young
Technician Supervisor
S.a.A. Computer Repair
steven@saacomputer.com
Cell 503-851-6977
Field Solutions Tech #44922

http://www.saacomputer.com

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