Friday, June 6, 2008

UBCD4Win

Ultimate Boot CD for Windows

This is a program that's been around for a while, but worth a mention for those who may not have stumbled across it yet. UBCD4WIN is a bootable CD that contains a plethora of software used for repairing, restoring, or diagnosing many computer problems. Almost all of the software included in UBCD4Win are freeware utilities for Windows®. Some of the tools included are "free for personal use" copies and a few are paid for and licensed software owned by UBCD4win.

UBCD4Win is based on Bart's PE©. Bart's PE© builds a Windows® "pre-install" environment CD, basically a simple Windows® XP booted from CD. UBCD4Win includes network support, tools to modify NTFS volumes, recover deleted files, create new NTFS volumes and scan hard drives for viruses, just to name a few.

Ok, so think about this: you have a PC with a virus or root kit - how do you get rid of it when you are booting the OS that has the virus? UBCD4Win gives you a way to boot a read-only copy (it boots from a CDROM, duh) of WinXP, mount the disk drive volume and run multiple antivirus, spyware, etc. tools against that drive. There are some tools to do a clean wipe of a disk drive, say if you are returning some PCs to the leasing company. There are disk imaging tools (see my post on SelfImage) included in UBCD4Win, so you can image your PC hard drive before upgrading, as a regular backup routine, whatever, and a master boot record backup utility, useful if you ever need to repair the MBR on your disk drive.

There are even tools to remote mount the registry of the internal disk on the PC and repair/recover/remove keys, etc., a CMOS password recovery/modification tool and a tool to re-set or set anew the password of any user with a local valid account on the PC or server. You can even create a new user, with admin rights, and assign it a fresh password. Yes, this tool could be used maliciously, but the good outweighs the bad in this case.

In addition to repair and recovery utilities, there are FTP servers, FTP clients, xterm emulations, IP scanners, RDP client, Novell client, VNC server, and more.

Now, all that said, it takes some time and effort to put this together, so it's not for the faint of heart. You'll also need a licensed copy of Windows XP (recommend SP2) to get the base XP files over to the UBCD4Win CD. Also, once you download and install the UBCD4Win program, you need to go thru and update all of the utilities, anti-virus signature, etc. and that takes some time as well. Take the time to read the instructions, there are plenty of screenshots and suggestions, as well as caveats to avoid.