We’ve all been there for a system crashing or having a hardware issue. Finding the causes of this issue can be tricky if you don’t have the right tools.
Luckily, Ultimate Boot CD exists to help us get through these problems.
This series of utilities can help find the issue and help get the system back up and running quickly.
So what is UBCD? It’s a community driven suite of diagnostic utilities started by a user who had a system without a floppy drive. Needing a CD based solution to get to the root of the problem, UBCD was born.
It has grown to provide a wide variety of utilities that can be booted off of a CD or USB stick, becoming a Swiss Army Knife for IT professionals. It’s one of the first things we look to when trying to fix an issue with a system. What kind of utilities does UBCD have? Let’s say a system goes down or has some sort of issue that requires some investigation.
Assuming it isn’t an issue with something such as the power supply that we can easily spot, we grab one of our USB sticks with UBCD on it. We generally start with RAM and hard drive tests. UBCD has MemTest and well as hard drive diagnostics utilities from multiple manufacturers. Sometimes hard drive issues aren’t necessarily caught by the diagnostic utility but there’s still an issue with the SMART information and there are utilities for that as well. Parted Magic is a Linux distribution which provides a GUI for the user and can run various tasks such as checking the SMART information.
There are many other utilities that UBCD provides, so experiment with them to see what else it has to offer. It’s a quick and easy process to get UBCD up and running.
- Simply download the latest version, located here, which now includes a description of each utility to help find the correct one for the situation.
- Download and install ImgBurn or a similar program to burn the .iso file to a CD.
- Either access the boot selection menu or change the BIOS settings so the CD or DVD drive comes first in the boot order to boot into UBCD and the easy to navigate menus can help to isolate most issues with any system.
