[LoveIsNull]

SystemRescueCD
Ultimate Boot CD 4 Windows

I searched and was surprised to find these utilities have seldom been referenced here. Only by me and I think one post made reference to SystemRescueCD, so for those of you that don't know these are two wonderful live CD's filled with utilities for system recovery and maintenance related tasks. SystemRescueCD can be used to assist in the recovery of both Windows and Linux systems, UBCD4Win has loads of crap for Windows systems.
UBCD4Win actually uses the files from a Windows installation disk or recovery directory to create an ISO image of what is basically a live, bootable Windows environment that runs included third party software and utilities.
I personally have used Test-Disk on several occasions to recover lost partitions from a corrupt hard drive, but of course there are other uses for them.

[no2pencil]

The Ultimate Boot CD 4 Windows is fine & dandy, if you ever have a need to boot your system without NTFS write capabilities.

Now I don't know about you, but when I'm fixing an issue, it usually requires making a change, & all of the tools provided by the Ultimate Boot CD 4 Windows boot to a read-only NTFS kernel. I've found it to be very interesting, but also very useless.

[LoveIsNull]

Interesting, I cannot say I was aware of that. I thought Test-Disk wrote to the disk, at least the mbr?
But, that utility is also on SystemRescueCD along with GParted.

[no2pencil]

In my experience with the Ultimate Boot CD 4 Windows, I've used some of the provided OS repair utilities (such as booting to a command prompt to edit files) & a few of the Virus scanners. However in both situations once the time came to either save my edits or remove the viruses, I was unable to. That's because during the boot process you get to choose which NTFS support you wish to use & the only selection is ReadOnly. Kind of neat for booting the system, but rather useless for getting any work done with the provided tools.