I have written articles about live cds before, but just to recap, they are CDs that you can boot from and run your computer straight from the CD and memory, rather than the hard disk. If your system gets trashed by a virus or you start having hard disk problems, they can be a life saver.

I have a custom made version of WindowsPE, and rely pretty heavily on it for system recovery, but I always like to find another useful bootdisk that can do something my other ones might not be able to. There are several tools to build WindowsPE bootable cds from, but this is an easy tool that doesn’t take much work.

UBCD4Win.com has a downloadable tool that will build a bootable WinPE CD that can help you recovery data from a failed hard disk. Everything from deleted files to corrupted partitions. When you run it, it will prompt you for the location of your original Windows OS cd and copy the needed files to an image that can be converted to a CD. The CD comes with a vast array of virus scanners, data recovery tools, data destruction tools and much more.

Here is a list of tools included and here is the download page for the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows