On a recent business trip I was given a copy of Winternal 2005 and was blown away how useful it was, and how I had never used it! You can boot into a broken install of Windows, crack passwords, transfer files, etc. Good stuff. So it got me to thinking, what other essential tools are out there that I'm missing out on? So list your favorite software and hardware tools here and what you use them for. Here's an updated list and all of the helpful links moved to the top of the thread for easy access, per the suggestion of our fearless leader Dan. Just let me know if I missed anything or you have more to add! 1) Winternals 2005 and / or other BOOT CD (see links below) 2) Partition Magic 3) A small tool kit - screw drivers, wrenches, wire cutters, pliers, tweezers, etc. 4) A USB IDE / SATA adapter - for data recovery 5) Hard Drive Scanner - a free tool that's great to determining what is taking up disk space 6) Soldering iron 7) Hammer 8) Crossover cable 9) USB thumb drive ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Knoppix Linux Boot CD - KNOPPIX Linux Live CD USB hard drive cable - Newegg.com - Once You Know, You Newegg Windows XP "rebuild command" - Langa Letter: XP's Little-Known 'Rebuild' Command - News by InformationWeek Windows XP SP2 slipstreaming how-to - http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/windowsxp_sp2_slipstream.asp Ultimate Boot CD - Ultimate Boot CD - Overview Hiren's Boot CD - Hiren's boot CD - Google Search Hard Drive Scanner - Freeware Section
Winternals? I haven't looked on torrent but I'm sure it's out there. That's basically what I want to do - collect a list of essentials and then torrent the shit out of them!
That's all I need besides what is allready built into winblows itself. A crossover Cat5e cable, a laptop, IDE -> USB adapter.
Don't forget a usb enclosure that can support laptop drives as well! also, Bart PE (similar to knoppix)
Yeah, that USB hard drive cable supports laptop drives too. Talk about a cheap way to have an external drive! Check it out... http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16812156102
-A bootable USB Key Drive with BartPE and toolkits built in. I lost the link to the webpage containing a guide on where to download it and how to use it.
Man, I'm getting some great ideas from this thread. Knoppix is downloading now, I've slipstreamed my Windows XP install CD (I've been meaning to do that anyway), and I'll order me a USB key drive shortly. Keep 'em coming guys! What about physical tools? Soldering iron? Yeah, I need to add that too. But I have these I forgot to mention: 6) Cable tester (both patch and in-wall) 7) Refillable air can
yeah, thats a good point. It all depends on if the BIOS supports booting from USB devices or not. As far as other additions, anything from Sysinternals is a winner IMO. I enjoy their PageDefrag program, TCPview, ProcessExplorer, Rootkit Revealer, and of course, PSTools. If you want to image machines via a LAN, but you don't want to do a Powercast or Ghost broadcast, you can use UniversalBootDisk that works with allmost any nic and put your ghosting programs on that. It has support for Win32 networked enviornments, so you can join domains, map network drives, and anything else you want via a DOS prompt.
Hiren's boot CD has everything you will ever need. The Winternals tools are not that impressive. You will need a thumb drive with the newest versions of: hijackthis, rootkit revealer, icesword (if you can find it =P), crap cleaner, winsock fix, and I always like to have a copy of spysweeper and ewido with the latest def files. Any version of Linux can be very useful for data rescue. Knoppix is a good way to go.
Ultimate Boot CD's another alternative that's quick, free, and easy. For memory, hard drive, and CPU stability tests it's pretty useful.
i've used this a few times... it was pretty nice to use u DONT need knopix if u have Winternals 2005 btw dont waist your time
I've used that before. it is a lifesaver if you don't want to boot into any OS but need to run something that accesses network shares. For example, we used UBD to boot to DOS, authenticated to the domain, mapped a network drive to a server with image files on it and then started up Powerquest image center to image the box in question. this method was better than using a boot disk w/ the powercast client that powerquest supports b/c the powercasting can sometimes bog down the network too much and the school we admin doesn't like it when we break their internets.
