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, most 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 f ...

and

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

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, or a diskette) is an obsolescent 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 w ...

. 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 Free-DOS and 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 system ...

, 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 creating a 1-to-1 copy of a hard disk drive (HDD) or solid-state drive (SSD), not just its files. Disk cloning may be used for upgrading a disk or replacing an aging disk with a fresh one. In this case, the clone can r ...

, 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 Parted Magic is a commercial Linux distribution based on Slackware that comes with disk partitioning and data recovery tools. It is sold as a Linux-based bootable disk. The distribution's nomenclature is derived from the names of the GNU Parted ...

), 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 operating system for amd64/i686 personal computers intended to be binary-compatible with computer programs and device drivers made for Windows Server 2003 and later versions of Windows. ReactOS has been noted a ...

."Ultimate Windows Boot CD with ReactOS"

References

External links

* * {{SourceForge, ubcd Operating system distributions bootable from read-only media Free data recovery software Live USB

Related projects

See also

References

External links