UBCD4Win Logo

By Michael Santo
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews

Earlier David wrote an article about 3 great free Windows utilities. Those are all great, but they require one thing … a bootable PC. What happens if you can’t boot your PC, but have data you absolutely must get off it? Enter the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows (UBCD4Win).

The UBCD4Win is free … except for one part … more on that, later. The Author of the project is Benjamin Burrows. I would say the daunting part of this utility is that it must be built. You can download all the free parts here, but because of the non-free part, he can’t provide an ISO image to download or anything. You have to build it yourself.

What is the non-free part? Windows, of course. When you’re doing building this, you’ll have a boot CD that will access NTFS volumes, login to your network (assuming the drivers are available for your hardware), browse the Internet, scan for viruses, backup your hard drive … all with a nice GUI. Honestly, the site has step-by-step instructions on building, and once you’ve done it one time, it’s easy (oh, all right … pretty easy). The main package is updated quite often (just yesterday, in fact) as are the driver packages.

We Say: Only for emergencies, but very handy. I had one hard drive fail on me, and although I had an image of it, there were files that had changed since that image was made. I used UBCD4Win, moved those files onto a network drive, put the new hard drive in, reinstalled the old image, copied the files over from the network … in about an hour. I also used one of the utilities when a friend was having trouble converting a cheap Linux PC he bought to Windows (see my story on it here). If you try this, and like it, don’t forget to donate!