UBCD4WIN to the rescue!

I thought i’d post up a quick plug for UBCD4WIN which got me out of a rather large hole this week.

UBCD4WIN is a customised/improved version of BartPE which is a cut down “Pre-instal environment” version of windows that has been customised to include a plethora of repair tools and utilities to help fix problem computers. Got a really stubborn virus? no problem boot up off this cd and you can clear it without having to fight with it.

Anyway….. I had decided to take the plunge and upgrade my vista laptop (and main computer) to Windows 7 RC to give it a good testing, I had used the beta for a while on my old work computer and was very impressed by the stability even then. So as you do, I took a full backup image of my vista partition using DriveImage XML and then preceded to load Windows 7.

Everything went fine with the load and using the new os was easy and enjoyable but I soon discovered had a driver problem with my wireless and couldnt download anything off the internet any faster than about 3kbps so decided to revert back to my vista instalation which i knew worked.

Enter UBCD4WIN

Until very recently I had been working as an IT Systems field engineer so I had for quite a while had the UBCD in my tool bag for emergencies and proved quite useful in many circumstances.  One of its key features is an easy to use UI which allows access to included imaging tools (Driveimage XML) to either backup or restore images to partitions.

At this point i don’t know what went wrong as the backup image was fine as i could open and browse but apparently restoring it killed the boot loader and the file system, so i tried a second time and still no luck. Now in a bit of a panic i decided to manually format the drive and then extract the image contents back to the hard drive which eventually (after having to repair the bootloader, which had somehow reverted to the XP one)  resolved my problem.

But i couldnt have done it without the immensly useful tool that is UBCD4WIN. If you want to check it out head over to the website by clicking here

Update: Forgot to mention above that both UBCD4WIN and BartPE support plugins so that developers can make it easy to include their tools on such bootable cds, for example Acronis have a plugin for their TrueImage product line which will let you restore drive images back to your hard drive.

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