Direction & Direction Lite Alternatives

A highly-customizable multiboot USB stick for modern PC Repair. Supports both Legacy BIOS and UEFI. Based on Ventoy.

Not to be confused with the newer Hiren’s BootCD PE

Hiren’s BootCD PE (Preinstallation Environment) is a restored edition of Hiren’s BootCD based on Windows 10 PE x64. PE version is being developed by Hiren’s BootCD fans. it supports UEFI booting and requires minimum 2 GB RAM.

Live/Bootable CD with network support containing tools for file and system recovery, virus scans and more.

DiskGenius, previously PartitionGuru, is full-featured partition manager, which is designed to optimize disk usage for Windows users.

Knoppix is an operating system based on Debian designed to be run directly from a CD / DVD (Live CD) or a USB key (Live USB), one of the first of its kind for any operating system. When starting a program, it is loaded from the removable medium and decompressed into a RAM drive.

Trinity Rescue Kit or TRK is a free live Linux distribution that aims specifically at recovery and repair operations on Windows machines, but is equally usable for Linux recovery issues. Since version 3.

Rescatux is a GNU/Linux rescue cd (and eventually also Windows) but it is not like other rescue disks. Rescatux comes with Rescapp. Rescapp is a nice wizard that will guide you through your rescue tasks.

From the site: "I have been a field service technician for many years, which means that I am out on my own fixing computers on-site and don’t always have the support of a shop or colleagues to help.

Windows stores its user information, including crypted versions of the passwords, in a file called 'sam', usually found in \windows\system32\config. This file is a part of the registry, in a binary format previously undocumented, and not easily accessible.