Its command-line interface can be a little intimidating, but in most cases all you need to do is follow the prompts. This little Linux-based beauty, written by Petter Nordahl-Hagen, is a free alternative to Active Boot Disk for resetting Windows passwords. Its imaging abilities aren’t up to those in R-Drive Image, but they’re still more versatile than those in Windows. Active Boot Disk is a great all-around toolkit. PE’s major advantages are that it presents the familiar Windows GUI, and it lets you load oddball drivers at boot time-most handy with unusual older hardware, or when a new technology such as USB 3.0 shows up before Windows or Linux starts including drivers for it. Just keep in mind that changing a password will kill your ability to recover data from Windows-encrypted accounts.Īctive Boot Disk uses the Windows Pre-Install Environment (PE). I can’t even tell you the number of times that ability can save the day, whether by permitting you to log on to a computer for which you’ve forgotten the password, or by allowing access to data stored on a former employee’s PC. Active (branded as also lets you change Windows passwords. It’s especially reliable.Īt $80, this boot drive may seem pricey, but it provides top-notch file and partition recovery in addition to the ability to create and restore images. R-Drive Image’s minimalist modern interface is easier for the less geeky to navigate.īecause it additionally offers a full-blown Windows version that mounts images as virtual hard drives, R-Drive has been my go-to boot-drive and backup tool for the past few years. The basic interface (as low as 64MB) is an adorable back-to-the-’80s, character-based affair, but the program also has a modern interface with a more Windows-friendly look. As of version 5.1, it supports the vast majority of SATA, USB, and network hardware. The R-Drive Image image-recovery utility works with a minimal amount of memory and supports every modern file system: FAT, NTFS, Linux, Mac, and BSD types, and even the latest ReFS in Microsoft’s Server 2012. Maybe it will challenge you to a nice game of chess. R-Drive Image’s basic interface will make you want to gag yourself with a spoon, but it uses very little memory. If the Windows recovery disk won’t work for you (and it sometimes won’t), then you need to turn to something more capable, versatile, and reliable, such as one of the boot drives described below. vhd (Virtual Hard Drive) images by attaching them through Computer/Drive Management, but only after you’ve reinstalled Windows. Unfortunately, Windows’ image-restore feature isn’t reliable at restoring to different hardware, such as a functioning hard drive brought in to replace a failing one. This is usually your second-best option, however, as you lose any data written to the hard drive since the image was created.ĭiskpart is Microsoft’s effective, but command-line-only, partition editor. If you can’t recover using the aforementioned tools, the disk also allows you to restore the entire system partition (and other partitions, if you included them in the backup) from a Windows backup image file you’ve created. (A noisy hard drive may be failing, in which case you’re better off backing it up before doing anything else, including running diagnostics.) Don’t give up on a quiet hard drive with errors until you’ve tried chkdsk it may fix the issues you’re having. The command prompt gives you access to useful tools such as Microsoft’s disk-partitioning utility and, of course, the venerable chkdsk hard-drive scanning and repair utility, which can fix file-system errors or map bad drive sectors. A Windows 7 or 8 recovery disk is often the best place to start when your system fails.
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