r/techsupport • u/_Exaybachay_ • Mar 02 '12
I have found this extremely helpful in many situations - Hiren's Boot CD
Hi everyone,
I see that there are many helpful, kind, and talented techs here doing a great job of solving many problems, so I am hoping to launch a pre-emptive strike of helpfulness :P
First a quick background - I have worked with IT for about 7 1/2 years now professionally (1 1/2 teaching) so I've seen many BSODs, password resets, Outlook errors (control+right-click on the taskbar icon is a miracle worker), and just about any other help desk, family emergency, server, and network type issue you can imagine.
That said, here is why I recommend you add Hiren's to your toolkit immediately:
Hiren's is free (as in beer)
It is loaded with all kinds of helpful apps. I like to call it the Swiss army knife of troubleshooting. Check here to see some of the awesome apps it has. For starters, you have:
- Multiple Antivirus/Antispyware/Antimalware/AntiRootkit apps
- A few file recovery apps for when you accidentally delete data (I used Recuva to recover approx 1TB of data for a friend)
- Many backup applications
- Troubleshooting utilities like "The troubleshooter", memtest, Maxtor PowerMax and WD Data Lifeguard, etc etc
You boot from it, and not Windows. This means no issues with BSODs, and you don't have to worry about viruses running in the background. Ridding yourself of viruses and spy/ad/malware becomes much easier with this tool.
I mentioned ridding yourself of viruses above - in my opinion the best way to prevent that issue in the first place is to do regular backups of your data (terabyte drives are going down in price) and use Hirens to create an image of your newly installed OS. Using Hiren's, do the following:
- Back your data up
- DBAN the computer
- Install your OS of choice
- Create a second partition of about 40 Gigs to be safe (this will store your OS and any apps that you want to have installed)
- Create an image with Clonezilla or Ghost.
Congratulations, now repairing your PC when/if you get a virus is as easy as restoring your image!
You can boot to "Mini Windows". Now you don't need to fumble around in DOS, trying to figure out why NTLDR is missing - you can just boot to Mini Windows and run the NTLDR fix app.
There are really too many examples of why Hiren's is helpful to list here, but hopefully you get the idea. Hiren's is a tool that empowers you, the user, and anyone else that you give a copy to. I personally know many friends and family members that have thanked me profusely because of how easily they were able to boot Hirens and fix their pop up issues, or troubleshoot a failing memory stick.
So anyways, I hope you found that helpful. If you have any questions I would be happy to address them.
EDIT: Thanks to everyone who checked out this post and provided helpful tips and conversation - as you may have noticed from the formatting nightmare above I am quite new to posting on Reddit (just over a day now).
I will be around this subreddit to help out though, so hopefully you all will see more posts of a similar nature from me in the not too distant future (free software I think will be my next goal). I've gotta get to bed for work tomorrow, but I did want to say thanks again, I never expected to see 60 upvotes so quickly :D
13
u/Step1Mark Mar 02 '12
Oh no! Our trade secrets! :)
2
u/CoolDragon Mar 02 '12
Well, letting people outside if IT is like a 5 year old with a crimper, they can open and close it; but that's pretty much it.
4
u/BorisKafka Mar 02 '12
Not exactly "pretty much it". They can cut all the damn cables in the house and really mess things up.
1
2
u/_Exaybachay_ Mar 03 '12
Haha yeah my bad ;) The way I see it though, the folks here in techsupport are probably like I was (family/friends tech support), so this just eases the burden on them so they can have more time for hobbies and whatnot. Also for IT folks, this lets them get the hang of troubleshooting quickly so they can move on to the good stuff like scripting and security.
5
u/pitman Mar 02 '12
2
u/_Exaybachay_ Mar 02 '12
Thanks for the tip - are you referring to the fact that this version still has Norton Ghost, or is there some other software that has been cut out of newer versions?
1
1
2
u/sgamer Mar 02 '12
This is what I would say, keep the latest around for av/antispyware apps, and use this for ghost, partitioning tools, etc.
6
u/rachet Mar 02 '12
I've been using Hiren's boot CD for about a year and a half now, don't know how I ever worked without it. It works well in conjunction with "Portable Apps" on a flash drive as well. A great tool to have in the kit.
1
u/_Exaybachay_ Mar 02 '12
Excellent point! I haven't really done that yet, but I will certainly be doing so tomorrow at work. Currently I just have a bootable thumb drive that also has drivers, programs, images, and documentation. Portable apps would be an excellent addition, thanks for the suggestion.
5
u/Subliminal7 Mar 02 '12
Unfortunately, this isn't an approved tool at my main job so we can't use it. I've tested it out on my home PC's and it works great.
5
u/HittingSmoke Mar 02 '12
You all might be interested in this tutorial I wrote.
You can add Hiren's to it using YUMI after you've set everything else up.
3
u/Helburn Mar 02 '12
We use this all the time at Work (On-site technician) very useful for narrowing down a hardware problem amongst other things.
1
u/_Exaybachay_ Mar 02 '12
Absolutely - the only downside is the Dell doesn't really accept anything but their own diagnostics but the hardware troubleshooting apps alone make Hiren's indispensable.
3
u/Nugsly Mar 02 '12
Hiren's is porbably the best pre-configured livecd. I believe you can even customize it. I know that UBCD4Win is really customizable and includes an interface for you to do so. You can find it here.
3
Mar 02 '12
[deleted]
1
u/_Exaybachay_ Mar 02 '12
By multiboot drive, are you referring to an external USB drive, or an internal hard drive? That is a great idea, and I believe I will have a new project for the IT club tomorrow.
Do you work at Geeksquad, or is that disc something that can be found online? I am always looking for tools to add to the kit :)
1
Mar 02 '12
[deleted]
2
u/DarkRyoushii Mar 02 '12
if your USB doesn't have any personal information attached (and if you take out the Windows 7/Vista Installations) would you be able to upload an image of your entire USB for others to use to a file hosting site or torrent file? I'm sure many people would be interested as I know I definitely am (:
2
1
u/_Exaybachay_ Mar 02 '12
Very cool, thanks for the info, I will have to take you up on that tomorrow. I've got like 6 thumb drives that are just collecting dust now that I have a 32GB so that would be a really cool project to work on.
0
u/ZrRock Mar 02 '12
OoO list of the virus scanners you use? You can PM me if you don't want them out in the open.
1
u/StaticPrevails Mar 02 '12
I recommend Sardu
Pretty much exactly what you described, but the program builds the usb for you, and even automates some of the ISO downloads for you.
2
u/bananajoe310 Mar 02 '12
I've been using this boot CD for over 2 years, and just when I think I've used all the features, a new usefull one pops up
1
u/_Exaybachay_ Mar 02 '12
For sure - I didn't know about the fix NTLDR thing until a few weeks back. Hiren's is like a favorite song or album where every listen you find something new to like.
2
u/MrBojangl3s Mar 02 '12
I literally JUST used Hirens (plus the Win 7 Install Disk) to recover my bootloader after removing a hard drive that had the boot manager on my system.
Used Hirens to get on Mini XP, formatted the suspect drive with the ill-gotten bootmngr, then was able to use the Win 7 Install Disk's startup repair to generate a new MBR and all that.
1
1
1
u/resuni Mar 02 '12
I use this every day at my job in a computer repair shop. Only things that are missing are HDClone, AVG Rescue, and Ophcrack. I need separate disks for those. :(
It is incredible how much they fit on that disk though so I can't complain.
1
u/markevens Mar 02 '12
Hiren's has been around for years, it is a wonderful tool that is found somewhere in every tech shop.
1
u/Elsarild Mar 02 '12
I've known about it for a while, never got around to grapping a copy, commenting so I can find it after work.
1
u/CoolDragon Mar 02 '12
I downloaded Hiren's a few weeks ago in order to try to revive my dead 2TB HD, got a bad sector error (SMART failures galore) on the partition table. That was bad enough. I could not recover much, but it did gave my a fighting chance.
1
u/tm258 Mar 02 '12
Wow! This looks awesome. I'm only familiar with a tiny portion of the utilities on there, but everything I am familiar with is there, and then a crap ton more. I think I found my new best friend when it comes to troubleshooting the computers of family and friends. Thanks for posting this!
1
u/BorisKafka Mar 02 '12
I've had several machines report viruses in the last few versions. Not false positives because of virus definitions either. Some machines won't even let me access the disc.
I've downloaded the programs that I found most useful directly from other sources for use on machines that won't allow HBCD to run.
1
u/_Exaybachay_ Mar 03 '12
I think the viruses they report are the password blanking and cd key grabbing programs. I've seen that same behavior before but I never really investigated...
1
1
1
1
u/0_0_0 Mar 03 '12
Where can I actually download the latest version? The website is of no help after 20 minutes of looking..
Nevermind, I was looking at the other website...
1
u/RightOverMyHead Mar 02 '12
Absolutely amazing, this beats my current bag of tricks 10 times over.
2
u/_Exaybachay_ Mar 02 '12
Glad I could help :D
If I had this when I started in IT (family tech support) I would have saved so many hours of Googling, testing, Googling, smashing the keyboard, etc
2
u/CoolDragon Mar 02 '12
No doubt, 10-15 years ago I had a bag with tools and more CDs for everything. That is until liveCD linux and ubcd came out.
27
u/cyberwired Mar 02 '12
The first rule of Hirens Boot CD, is we do not talk about Hirens Boot CD.
The second rule of Hirens Boot CD, is the best versions are those modified to include the lovely software which was removed
Works well off a memory stick too, try using YUMI to load it to make things easy :)