Bootable Rescue Flash Drives

(Page 1 of 4 )

Technicians and computer professionals are well-known for flipping through see-through CD and DVD sleeves, looking for the exact disc that will rescue your operating system, back up your critical data, and so forth. Over the years that stereotypical image should have been replaced with carrying around only one USB flash drive, which might be attached to their key-chain.

This article you are reading is the fourth and final segment of an article series covering bootable thumb drives, modifying BIOS settings to customize the boot order, and running all kinds of “live” operating systems without requiring installations. Be sure to check out those previous parts if you’ve missed any of them. They’re published here as well.

Throughout this article we are going to take a look at what kind of utilities and tools we should have ready to use on our bootable rescue USB flash drive. We will present a few so-called professional tech's bootable troubleshooting CDs and see how we can “migrate” those onto our flash drive. Fortunately, thumb drive memory nowadays can hold the content of more than one CD.

This article assumes that you have read the previous three -- that is, that you can create a bootable flash drive and configure your BIOS to make it boot from one. Therefore, we will move on and continue filling  our flash drives with lots of “must-have” tools and utilities that can save us from a bad day.

Utilities could be broken down as belonging to one or more of the following categories: HDD cloning, partitioning, wiping, low-level editing, and diagnostics; stress-testing and benchmarking (CPU, memory, network interface, HDD, peripherals); overall system information; file managers; a large variety of boot disks; anti-virus and malware utilities, BIOS-related tools, and many really useful applications of all kinds!

Next: First Pack of Tools >>
 

More Storage Devices Articles
More By Barzan "Tony" Antal

blog comments powered by Disqus