Often times, when repairing PCs, it is necessary to run diagnostics from bootable media.  If your occupation has you repairing different PCs daily, you probably have a section of your toolbox set up for hard drive diagnostics - as they vary from brand to brand.  I got quite sick of downloading and using unreliable floppies for this type of work.  Then, someone pointed me to a neat Open Source application that had all kinds of bootable media compiled into a single bootable CD.  It is called The Ultimate Boot CD, and can be downloaded here:  http://ubcd.sourceforge.net/index.html  Screenshots could not be obtained because the program runs in DOS, but there are shots available here:  http://mrbass.org/ubcd/

The Ultimate Boot CD contains an archive of programs ranging from hard drive diagnostics to file system tools, even to user-defined custom tools.  It has all major diagnostic tools from the major brands of hard drives, including Maxtor, Seagate, Western Digital, and more.  Some other notable programs built in are Memtest86 - used to test RAM, PCI-Sniffer - used to detect hardware information, F-Prot Anti-Virus, and many more.  It has just about everything you need to be able to do from DOS, and if it doesn’t, you can add your own!

The package comes in two different versions - a basic and a full version.  The basic version is quite a bit smaller, but has a little less customization possibility.  The full version allows for enhanced modularity, and some Linux tools.  For most purposes, I found the basic version to cover everything I needed.

Download and install is fairly simple, allowing you to download either a self extracting executable or a zip file, both of which will extract an ISO file (a CD image) to your hard drive, which you must burn to a CD.  After burning to a CD, all you have to do is pop the disc into any computer that has CD-booting capabilities (which is almost all models in the last 7-10 years, depending on BIOS), and turn the computer on.  The computer will then boot onto the CD.

Navigation on the disc is very simple - the programs are ordered into categories that you can select depending on your current needs, then navigate the sub-headings to find the program you want to run.  It is very efficient in the way it manages the programs, providing the easiest possible way (in DOS, at least) to help you find what you are looking for.

I mentioned above that the full version allows you to add custom scripts and more programs to the CD.  It comes with a nice GUI for Windows that allows you to insert several more programs from a list that covers just about anything you could need.  Its very helpful when you need to do something specific from the bootable CD that normal users would not need.  I found this to be a very handy extra feature.

Overall, the Ultimate Boot CD is quite amazing, and does exactly what it is supposed to.  It helped me do tons of diagnostics on a computer, without the need for 15 floppies to be written.  I was very impressed!

Thanks to GLC for suggesting this program.