I have already written a post on my good experiences with the Active Boot Disk product from LSoft technologies. Recently I had to work on a messed up system and I upgraded to the latest version of Active Boot Disk (5.3). The new version is more polished and includes instructions on downloading an open source anti-virus program that you can run while working inside of Active Boot Disk. The software includes other new features and updates to the included utilities, but overall I was impressed with how much easier it was to use.
If you haven’t used Active Boot Disk before, I highly recommend it for PC repair on software problems. It is also useful for backing up data from a bad hard drive (if you can read the drive), resetting user passwords, making partition changes, disk images, and wiping hard drives. The new version also lets you load drivers and other software into the boot CD image. If you have an older version of Active Boot Disk, check out the new features and see if it’s worth an upgrade.
Go to LSoft’s Active Boot Disk page for more information on this product.