The Ultimate Boot CD (UBCD) is a
bootable CD-ROM containing a collection of diagnostic tools
including CPU tests, memory tests, virus scanning, and other tools.
[
Computer Hope]
"UBCD"
The Ultimate Boot CD (UBCD) contains over 100 system diagnostics and hardware troubleshooting utilities.
The Ultimate Boot CD contains
freeware
Freeware is software, often proprietary, that is distributed at no monetary cost to the end user. There is no agreed-upon set of rights, license, or EULA that defines ''freeware'' unambiguously; every publisher defines its own rules for the free ...
and
open-source
Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...
diagnostic tools from a variety of sources.
Many of these tools were originally designed to boot from a
floppy disk drive
A floppy disk or floppy diskette (casually referred to as a floppy, a diskette, or a disk) is a type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined with a ...
. The Ultimate Boot CD made it possible to run them on a PC without a floppy drive.
[
Alex Cox]
"How to rescue old PCs with Ultimate Boot CD"
2018.
UBCD can also run from USB for computers without an optical drive.
The UBCD website has relatively good documentation for using the UBCD, and a discussion forum.
The Ultimate Boot CD also includes tools to create customized USCD ISO images
that can run additional tools extracted from bootable physical floppy disks and stored on the CD as floppy images (".img" or ".img.gz" files).
Related projects
UBCD includes a variety of diagnostic tools that were originally intended to run under DOS,
and also includes
FreeDOS
FreeDOS (formerly PD-DOS) is a free software operating system for IBM PC compatible computers. It intends to provide a complete MS-DOS-compatible environment for running Legacy system, legacy software and supporting embedded systems. FreeDOS ca ...
, which is used to run them.
["Ultimate Boot CD: Overview"]
UBCD includes a variety of
disk partitioning
Disk partitioning or disk slicing is the creation of one or more regions on secondary storage, so that each region can be managed separately. These regions are called partitions. It is typically the first step of preparing a newly installed disk ...
,
disk cloning
Disk cloning is the process of duplicating all data on a Digital Storage, digital storage drive, such as a Hard disk drive, hard disk or Solid-state drive, solid state drive, using hardware or software techniques. Unlike file copying, disk cloning ...
, and antivirus utilities that were originally intended to run under Linux,
and also includes a
small Live CD Linux distribution
(as of 2022, the freeware version of
Parted Magic), which is used to run them.
The "Ultimate Windows Boot CD with ReactOS"
is based on UBCD and
ReactOS
ReactOS is a Free and open-source software, free and open-source operating system for i586/amd64 personal computers that is intended to be binary-code compatibility, binary-compatible with computer programs and device drivers developed for Wind ...
.
"Ultimate Windows Boot CD with ReactOS"
See also
* List_of_live_CDs§Rescue_and_repair
* List of bootable data recovery software
References
External links
*
* {{SourceForge, ubcd
Operating system distributions bootable from read-only media
Free data recovery software
Live USB