Ultimate Boot CD (UBCD) Review

The Ultimate Boot CD (UBCD) is a Bootable Rescue CD based on Debian that has a variety of Tools integrated into the software that gives you the functionality and ability to perform basic and intermediate Rescue and recovery operations on your Computer.

Official Site: UltimateBootCD.com

UBCD can be downloaded and burned onto a CD or USB flash drive and used to perform any of the tasks you'll see listed below, ranging from Resetting Windows 7 Passwords that you have forgotten, to testing your RAM and CPU via its built-in MemTest and CPUstress utilities, as seen in the below screenshot.

The current release, as of this writing, is 5.3.5 and its always being updated with new tools and utilities to make it even more robust. We'll quickly overview each category that UBCD has in its main screen and explain what each does as well.

As you can see in the screenshot above, which is the main screen of the UBCD when you initially boot into it, there are 7 Main categories of tools and several other menu options. The main categories for UBCD are as follows (all info was taken from the ultimatebootcd.com official website):

1. BIOS
2. CPU
3. HDD
4. Memory
5. Others
6. Peripherals
7. System

Within those top level categories, there are utilities for each of their respective duties, of which the HDD category has 9 sub-categories within it, which are as follows:

HDD:

• Boot Management
• Data Recovery
• Device Info and Management
• Diagnosis
• Disk Cloning
• Disk Editing
• Disk Wiping
• Installation
• Partition Management

As you can see, Hard-drive Recovery, Management, Repair and anything else you want to do with a hard-drive is possible with UBCD. It almost seems that their are more tools for Hard drive management than any other category, but at the end of the day, HDD problems are the most common in our environment, so we're not complaining.

UBCD Tool and Utility Breakdown

Here's a table of the breakdown of what which tools are in each section, you can see more information about these tools if you click on their links:

(These were pulled directly via UltimateBootCD.com - check there for any updated tools and information)

As you can see, the list of tools and utilities is fairly exhaustive and inclusive of tools needed in an emergency situation. As any IT Professional or Technician knows, having a Boot disk with you on a USB flash/thumb drive can prove to very useful when it a bad situation. Whether your troubleshooting a local secure file server or a windows desktop – having a Rescue disk on hand is always a good idea. We run all sorts of network management tools in-house, along with syslog servers, tftp and sftp servers as well and if we've been in a situation where data-loss was imminent, we've use UBCD to recover files quickly and easily.

Many times we've had to pull out the UBCD to troubleshoot hard drive failures and such at a remote location away from our offices and its saved us several times.

For those looking for a Windows version of UBCD, you can check out UBCD4Win.org, as they've developed a cool spin-off of UBCD on Bart's PE pre-install environment.