Best Bootable Usb Toolkit
Janita Locklin
On one hand it will be a bootable device to load whichever boot disk we want, either for imaging, recovery, or other utilities, and at the same time be accessible within windows with my regular toolkit and scripts pack.
Out of all the tools at a technician's disposal, one is the most important. Inside my technician's toolkit I keep a USB flash drive loaded with the most amazing tools on the planet: my PC repair toolkit.
Three tools that I have found invaluable are the Ultimate Boot CD (UBCD), PartedMagic, and All in One System Rescue Toolkit (AiO-SRT). These three programs can resolve a wide range of Windows software issues. On top of that, the toolkits provide powerful hardware troubleshooting tools.
Live USBs can boot in place of the operating system (OS). This method bypasses software problems that prevent your computer from starting. So if you're trying to rescue important data or diagnose troublesome hardware, this method circumnavigates many pitfalls that would otherwise prevent your OS from loading.
Most technicians carry around a USB drive that can boot a toolkit. Typically, an image of the toolkit is burned onto a USB drive using an imaging program, like UNETBOOTIN. Other programs can create live USBs, such as Linux Live USB Creator or Live USB. You can even create bootable CDs, known as live CDs, using the same techniques and tools. However, the easiest method is using UNETBOOTIN and a USB flash drive.
One of AiOSRT's best features is that it also comes in the form of a standalone Windows executable. That means you can run the software from within a functioning Windows system, which cuts down on compatibility issues caused by Secure Boot. (LiveUSBs may not work with Secure Boot.)
If you run the Windows executable, it automatically launches the autoFIX script, which launches a hardware monitoring program and a CPU/GPU stress test program. It then initiates a virus scan and hardware and software diagnostic programs.
All three toolkits roughly compare to one another. However, UBCD possesses a big advantage: Parted Magic comes inside of UBCD. Unfortunately, UBCD's copy of Parted Magic is over three years old. Between the UBCD and AiOSRT, I prefer the latter. It offers both a Windows executable and a bootable image that can be burned onto a flash drive.
I keep all these tools on a single USB drive that I like to call the ultimate bootable Windows repair drive. Interested in building your own? You just need a modestly sized (256GB or 512GB) USB drive and the right software. This kind of setup works splendidly with Windows 7, 8, 8.1, 10, and 11 installations.
My technique relies on a special foundational tool called Ventoy, along with a collection of ISO files from which Ventoy will boot a Windows PC. The first part of this story introduces and explains Ventoy. The second part explains that improved performance may justify the cost of an NVMe SSD and a compatible USB drive enclosure. The third introduces a carefully curated collection of ISO files, with brief explanations of what they can do, what they contain, and where to find and download them.
Any collection of image files may be accessed using Ventoy. It works with most OSes, including Windows, the Windows Preinstallation Environment (WinPE, of which the Windows Recovery Environment, or WinRE, is a special case), Linux, Unix, VMware, and more. The developers claim to have tested more than 1,000 different ISO files and say that over 90% of the Linux distributions at DistroWatch.com are supported.
The best thing about Ventoy is that it can handle and boot from files larger than 4GB. That limitation is hard and fast for FAT32 media, where using larger files requires splitting them into two or more pieces. (See this Microsoft tutorial for relevant details.) Thankfully, Ventoy makes such contortions completely unnecessary.
Figure 1: The small partition at right lets the PC boot, builds a list of bootable files from the Ventoy partition in the center, and then passes boot control to any item picked from that list. Ingenious!
Thus, Ventoy can boot a PC from any bootable image among a collection of such things. For that reason, I use a USB-C attached NVMe drive enclosure with a 256GB NVMe drive mounted therein to obtain access to 40-odd bootable images (total size: approximately 180GB). This includes dozens of different Windows 10 and Windows 11 ISOs, and more.
In addition to the ISOs listed below, I also now keep all Windows 10 and Windows 11 ISOs I download from the Microsoft web pages or other download centers on my Ventoy drive. I omit listing them here because keeping them on the drive is a matter of convenience and easy access, not necessarily a repair and recovery strategy. That said, any current Windows 10 or 11 ISO can serve as Windows recovery media if chosen as a boot target in Ventoy.
Mt531b.iso: This is an alternate memory tester, MemTest86+, based on a well-known and well-documented open-source project. See the download page for a suitable link; it comes in either zip or gz compressed formats.
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To install an operating system or create a rescue disk, it is vital to burn the operating system onto CD/DVD/USB. Then you can get a bootable media. Nevertheless, you need to note that a piece of USB bootable software is required while burning the OS to CD/DVD/USB.
Rufus is an open-source and free USB bootable program. You can directly run it by double-clicking on its setup file without installation. This booting software enables you to create a bootable USB for all versions of Windows and Linux. The needed time depends on the drive size, the amount of passes, and USB drive speed.
In addition to making bootable USB drive, Rufus can also be used to flash BIOS and firmware, and run low-level utilities. And it offers you advanced options like partition scheme file system and cluster size while creating a Windows USB bootable drive. These options are beneficial to the creation of BIOS firmware or other low-level devices.
With Rufus, you can also check the USB drive for any bad sectors by selecting the check device for bad blocks option under the Format section. It supports files systems including FAT, FAT32, NTFS, UDF, and exFAT. Importantly, it has customizable bootloader options so that you can pick one based on your situation.
Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool allows you to create both bootable USB and DVD drives for Windows devices. You can install Windows XP, Vista, 7/8/8.1/10 on your computer with the bootable USB/DVD drives created by this tool.
To make a bootable USB drive through this tool, you need to download and install it, and download the ISO file of the target system. Then plug the USB into your PC and run Windows USB/DVD Download Tool. After that, follow the on-screen instructions to finish the process.
WinSetupFromUSB is another multifunctional bootable USB creator for Windows. As it prepares a multiboot USB flash drive or fixed disk, you can install multiple operating systems (like Windows 7, Windows 8, and Linux). It means that you can create more than one sets of Windows setup files and create a program that allows you to create a USB disc that can boot both in BIOS and UEFI. You will be asked which OS would you like to boot while booting from the USB drive.
In addition, WinSetupFromUSB can create bootable media for WinBuilder, WinPE, BartPE, UBCD4Win, etc. Though its interface is simple, it still provides you with advanced options that can be found under the Advanced Options checkbox. Last but not the least, it can test bootable media in QEMU emulator along with other tools like 7-Zip, RMPrepUSB, Bootice, etc.
If you need plug-and-play bootable USB software, WinToUSB is an ideal option. It has a user-friendly interface. It allows you to transfer contents of the Windows PE image to a USB drive so that you can create a bootable Windows PE USB drive. This is the feature what makes it one of the best USB bootable software.
Furthermore, WinToUSB lets you directly create Windows To Go from ESD/ISO/SWM/WIM/VHD/VHDX image files or CD/DVD drives. This booting software is available for Windows Vista/XP/7/8/10. It works with USB type C ports.
As its name indicates, Universal USB Installer enables you to create any type of bootable USB media. To be specific, it is capable of creating a bootable USB drive for Windows Linux/Vista/7/8/8.1. Moreover, it allows creating USB bootable devices with persistence storage, but please note that it is only available for the selected Linux distributions.
Like WinToUSB, Universal USB Installer also works with USB type C ports. This booting software has a simple interface. Even if you are a beginner, you can create a bootable USB drive on this tool smoothly. Simply choose the operating system from the drop-down menu, choose the ISO file and your USB drive, and then hit Install.
Windows Bootable Image Creator is a lightweight tool to create bootable USB drives from CD/DVD. It is easy to use and compatible with popular operating systems. However, it has limited OS options and few features. As you see in the next picture, its offered OS types only include Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows XP.
UNetBootin includes a collection of predefined distributions and system utilities. It is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux but with a separate file for each OS. It is built to create bootable Live USB drives for Ubuntu, Fedora, and other Linux distributions.
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