Have you ever found yourself in the predicament of having a dead PC and no backups of any of your personal data and needing to get at this data before re-installing? then read on.

I recently had this predicament with my wife's laptop after her hard disk died and windows would no longer boot. Of course she had not been backing up her data, so I needed to try and recover all her data before installing a new hard disk. Windows repair or any kind of disk repair couldn't help in this case, as the disk was far too corrupted to get windows working again. So I tried my trusty old BartPE CD, but alas this couldn't help me either as it did not have the correct drivers to recognise the network card or USB devices, so I could not copy the data anywhere. So I went looking for another solution and came across Ultimate Boot CD for Windows.

UBCD4Win is a bootable recovery CD that contains software used for repairing, restoring, or diagnosing almost any computer problem. Almost all the software included in UBCD4Win are freeware utilities for Windows®. Some of the tools included are "free for personal use" copies so users need to respect these licenses. A few of the tools included in UBCD4Win are paid for and licensed software owned by UBCD4win. 

UBCD4Win is based on Bart's PE. Bart's PE builds a Windows "pre-install" environment CD, basically a simple Windows XP booted from CD. UBCD4Win includes network support and allows you the ability to modify NTFS volumes, recover deleted files, create new NTFS volumes, scan hard drives for viruses, etc.

All you need is another working PC with a CD burner and your original Windows® XP CD, with at least Service Pack 1 (SP2 is highly recommended). If your CD does not have SP1 or SP2 included on it you can easily "slipstream" a Service Pack using a program called AutoStreamer.

Once you have created your boot CD, you then simply boot from this CD on your FUBAR pc (or laptop) and you are ready to rock.

I simply plugged in my USB external hard disk and backed up all my wife's personal documents, music, pictures, etc using the file explorer utility, thankfully most of them were not on the corrupted part of the disk. For those files that were corrupted and would not copy, I simply used the included file recovery tool to copy them from the laptop to the external hard disk where possible. In most instances this worked like a treat, even with the Outlook pst file, although the resulting pst file was itself still corrupted so that outlook could not read, so I still need an outlook pst repair tool. Unfortunately I as yet have not found a free one, and the commercial ones are far too expensive, and the emails are not worth that much to my wife.

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