hiren

I can't use hiren's boot tools with it like I could my other dead drives.

Ultimate Boot CD and Hiren's Rescue CD could have some tools that will test hard drives and cables.

For the software: for Windows side you can use Hiren's BootCD (you can use USB drive despite it's name).

Given the absence of official updates after November 2012, the PE version is currently under development by the fans of Hiren’s BootCD.

You would be better off downloading Hiren's boot cd and blindly hitting keys.

I might have confused it with Hiren’s BootCD as I could have swore it booted to a cmd prompt.

Hiren's bootcd is a bootable Windows image with lots of utilities bundled in.

Hi Hiren, just wanted to let you know about SolveBio (I'm the CTO).

Hiren's BootCD is exactly the kind of tool I've been looking for - but I can't find the download link on that page.

Other times, you need Win32, and would use something like modern Hiren’s Boot CD, which is Windows 10 based iirc, unlike the original releases which were XP based iirc.

Similarly, BitLocker with a TPM may not be impenetrable, but it does stop a kid from booting Hiren's and running ntpasswd to change the local admin password and install Roblox on mom's work laptop.

Additionally, I find it useful for live booting GNU/Linux distributions such as MX Linux Workbench [0] or WinPE environments such as Hiren's Boot CD [1] without dedicating a flash drive for the purpose, which I may accidentally overwrite.

Ultimate Boot CD and Hiren's Rescue CD could have some tools that will test hard drives and cables.

For the software: for Windows side you can use Hiren's BootCD (you can use USB drive despite it's name).

Given the absence of official updates after November 2012, the PE version is currently under development by the fans of Hiren’s BootCD.