Maintain your Windows PC; Part 2: Adding Utilities

Have you been showing off your new bootable pen drive to your friends? You must be having a halo behind your head right now. Wanna make that halo stay there for a longer time? Ok, here are a few utilities and links to their official pages.



I will say this again and again, please back up all your important data on your PC or anybody else's PC before doing anything that involves Disk partitioning, formatting, recovery etc. You get the idea.

Before you proceed, please download & install the following software to extract files from a compressed archive. We are assuming that you know about compressed files and folders and how to work with them - 7zip and/or Universal Extractor.

Utilities to be copied to your Pen Drive:

1) TestDisk
TestDisk is a powerful free data recovery software! It was primarily designed to help recover lost partitions and/or make non-booting disks bootable again when these symptoms are caused by faulty software, certain types of viruses or human error (such as accidentally deleting a Partition Table). Partition table recovery using TestDisk is really easy. TestDisk has features for both novices and experts. For those who know little or nothing about data recovery techniques, TestDisk can be used to collect detailed information about a non-booting drive which can then be sent to a tech for further analysis. Those more familiar with such procedures should find TestDisk a handy tool in performing onsite recovery. We recommend using the DOS version of this utility if you are not able to boot into Windows. Just download it, extract it and copy it to a folder on your pen drive. Remember to rename the folder to TestDisk as Long File Names are not supported in DOS.

2) Super Fdisk
Super Fdisk is the free DOS Partition Manager. With Super Fdisk you can quickly and easily create, delete, format partitions in DOS. There is a free Windows version also available at the website. Download, extract and copy to a folder of your choice on the pen drive. If necessary, rename the folder. A detailed FAQ and step-by-step screenshots are available on the author's website.

3) Undelete Plus
Undelete Plus is a quick and effective way to restore accidentally deleted files. It can also recover files that have been emptied from the Recycle Bin, permanently deleted files within Windows using the Shift + Delete, and files that have been deleted from within a Command Prompt. Undelete Plus works under Win 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista operating systems. The program supports all Windows file systems for hard and floppy drives including FAT12/16/32,NTFS/NTFS5 and image recovery from CompactFlash, SmartMedia, MultiMedia and Secure Digital cards. This utility does not have a DOS version. Download the version without the installer. Just one single file. Copy it to your pen drive and you are ready to go. To launch this utility, just double-click on the file.

4) Recuva
Recuva (pronounced "recover") is a freeware Windows utility to restore files that have been accidentally deleted from your computer. This includes files emptied from the Recycle bin as well as images and other files that have been deleted by user error from digital camera memory cards or MP3 players. It will even bring back files that have been deleted by bugs, crashes and viruses! Runs on Microsoft Windows Vista, XP, 2003, 2000 and 98.

These are some of the best free recovery/disk utilities I have come across. Please use these with care. In our next part, we will come up with some Windows based applications & utilities which will make you a "Portable" guru.