Microsoft Service Packs?

[mbpark]

I use the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows 3.0.

It's got drivers for mostly everything, including SATA drives and RAID arrays (and can be configured for more).

It also lets me run chkdsk on NTFS, which Linux does not . This has saved my customers' behinds more times than I can count, and also lets me image drives very well.

I have a large customer using this CD to boot "dead" servers and bring them back to operational status very quickly. I used this myself on a dual Xeon running Win2K Advanced Server and SQL Server 2000 to bring it back after a registry hive went corrupt due to old firmware on an HP SmartArray controller not properly syncing things on shutdown.

It also works well for cleaning registry entries and bad files caused by spyware/malware.

While I do like Linux, and utilize it heavily (including a Debian-based distribution for forensics that has dcfldd and many other good drive-duplicating tools on it), a Windows-based CD is also good for the minor fixes. We can't use anything but approved software for drive acquisition, so we do use Linux or Encase for that quite often.

Mitch