Vat of Knowledge

This boot disc is worth mention on this blog, because it is an important disc for any network technician, PC technician or system administrator.  It contains tools for Windows based systems and beyond, and has an arsenal of utilities you can’t do without.  I’ll breifly go over some of the utilities that I’m familiar with in this article.  Hiren’s Boot CD is up to version 9.6 as of this writing, and can be referenced at http://www.hiren.info/pages/bootcd

Update 12-09

Had to put this update out here, as Hiren 10.1 is currently out.  Here is a copy of the contents, click here for the text file (too large, don’t want to overrun this post with my thoughts on each utility).  Also, click here to create a bootable USB stick for use with Hiren!  Under the section, grubinst_gui, step 1 is referring to the USB drive, do not do this to your hard disk, or you can wipe your MBR (master boot record) and render yourself unbootable!!!

Partition Magic Pro 8.05

This utility allows you to resize partitions without losing data.  Very important tool for those familiar with it.  It will work with NTFS file systems as well as FAT, FAT32, and NFS file systems.  This comes in useful when cloning disks of different sizes, and reclaiming the remaining space for the operating system.  Windows has built in some of these resizing capabilities in their operating system, but not without data loss, which is where Partition Magic shines.

Acronis Disk Director Suite 9.0.554

This utility is similar to Partition Magic, but has more options, such as merging partitions without data loss on either partition.  Be careful when using, however, that partitions are not referenced in any of your applications.  For instance, I was looking at increasing the size of a C:\ partition that someone before me so wisely (ha) partitioned to 10 GB.  Unfortunately, it would have taken too much work to repair all the damage to my FTP virtual directories on this server, as the virtual directories where pointed to the D:\ partition, and I had several hundred virtual directories.

Super Fdisk 1.0

I haven’t personally used this utility, but if it can do what it claims, kewl!  It can supposedly:

Create, delete, format partitions drives without destroying data.

Active Partition Recovery 3.0

This utility has SAVED MY ASS.  Great utility.

McAfee Antivirus 4.4.50 (2909)

DOS level virus scanning with NTFS support and up to date definition files.  Nice.

Active Uneraser 3.0

Recover deleted files.  Invaluable.

The Troubleshooter 7.02

Awesome system troubleshooting tool.  Can also run in continuous cycles for benchmarking and burning in a newly built computer system to harden the build.

RAM (Memory) Testing Tools

Several RAM testing tools worth mentioning:

DocMemory 3.1b
GoldMemory 5.07
Memtest86+ 2.01

Hard Disk Diagnostic Utilities

This is one of the main things I have this disc for.  When a hard disk fails, these tools will tell you if there is actual surface damage or other hardware related failure.  If your drive is still under warranty, and you need to RMA the drive, you will need the error code output by the program that correlates with your drive.

Seagate Seatools Desktop Edition 3.02
Western Digital Data Lifeguard Tools
Western Digital Diagnostics (DLGDIAG) 5.04f
Maxtor PowerMax 4.23
Maxtor amset utility 4.0
Maxtor(or any Hdd) Low Level Formatter 1.1
Fujitsu HDD Diagnostic Tool 7.00
Fujitsu IDE Low Level Format 1.0
Samsung HDD Utility(HUTIL) 2.10
Samsung Disk Diagnose (SHDIAG) 1.28
IBM/Hitachi Drive Fitness Test 4.14
IBM/Hitachi Feature Tool 2.11
Gateway GwScan 5.12
ExcelStor’s ESTest 4.20
MHDD 4.6
WDClear 1.30
Toshiba Hard Disk Diagnostic 2.00b
SeaTools for Dos 1.10

Active Kill Disk 4.1

Good hard drive erasing utility that is DOD compliant.

BIOS tools

Several BIOS password crackers that are a must when you need it.

System info tools

Good tools for determining your system configuration.  Especially good to note that it has a PCI/AGP utility that can identify the manufacturer of your hardware, which is necessary, for instance, to build DOS level network drivers for a Bart boot disk (more on Bart in a future article).

Active Password Changer 3.0.420

Absolutely necessary to reset and/or enable the administrator account on any XP/2000/2003/Vista system.

NTFS Dos Pro 5.0

Read and write to the NTFS file system from DOS.  Great for backing up files on an utterly corrupted system.

Disk Clone Tools

Norton Ghost 11.5
A must have to clone drives, or restore from .gho image files.  Great cloning software, been using Ghost since version 1.0.

Acronis True Image 8.1.945
Another great cloning tool, probably even better than Ghost in my opinion.  This is a little old, I do prefer version 9 better.  This cloning tool has more SATA drivers, RAID drivers and network drivers than Ghost in my experience, and is the ONLY tool that will clone IBM Thinkpads.  Very invaluable tool!

Summary

All this and tons of SATA, RAID and network driver support.  I can’t stress how important having one of these discs is for any tech or admin.