Sep 27, 2020
Hiren’s bootable CD 15.2, a Godsend
Every Windows PC owner MUST have this free bootable CD or Flash Drive in case disaster strikes your PC
After a second rescue of one of my drives on my computer yesterday I don’t want to waste another moment not writing about this “wonder” of a Rescue CD that must be in the possession of everyone owning a Windows desktop or laptop. In fact I want to scream aloud from a pedestal. Loaded with a ton of free software it is highly likely that using one of the tools in the CD you’ll be able to solve your computer problem be that fixing a disk or data recovery. I was even able to recover data from a disk that was almost crashing.
The problem I had yesterday was with one of partitions of one of the drives. I noticed that the “chkdsk” command was being triggered on the D: drive on several occasions while switching on my PC. Then yesterday the drive D: became inaccessible. So this time I tried running “chkdsk” manually on the drive. I run Windows 7 on my PC and running “chkdsk” from the Command Prompt would take forever and each time I had to forcibly reboot the PC to stop the process. I then went online to search for solutions. I should have used the Hiren’s Boot CD instead. After spending hours online watching video after video and then reading solutions online I finally decided to pop in the Hiren’s Boot CD into my CD drive. I did try to run several programs and then finally I decided to boot the PC using Windows XP on the Hiren’s Boot CD. Note that your BIOS on the motherboard has to be tweaked so as to allow booting from the CD. You could do it with a flash drive too. Since I have a CD drive on my PC I used the same. After booting into Windows XP I checked for programs on Windows XP and there was “chkdsk” in one of the menus. Would you believe if I told you that “chkdsk” on Windows XP fixed the drive in less than 3 minutes and my D: drive was back, just like that. What a relief that was! In fact I am typing this post from the very same PC that got into trouble two days ago.
On an earlier ocassion when the hard disk was almost crashing (crashed hard disk is one where the disk(s) inside physically stop spinning) I was not able to invoke even the older Windows XP from the CD. What did I do? I used DOS based programs (there are several on the Hiren’s Boot CD) and was able to access every drive and file on the crashing hard disk and retrieve most of them.
Apart from fixing drives the Hiren’s Boot CD comes with a ton of goodies such as antivirus, hard disk repairing tools, editors, file recovery tools etc., There are just too many to list them all here.
Hiren’s Boot CD is now run and maintained by the fans of Hiren’s Boot CD. You can download the Hiren’s Boot CD 15.2 from their site linked below. It also contains details about the various programs on the disk and how to create your boot CD or flash drive. Download it and make a boot CD or flash drive and you’ll thank yourself for doing it someday. The Hiren’s Boot CD is such a big savior.
