Bootable CDs and Media Tools

A lot of the below is related to diagnostic booting and spyware removal. Note on Windows PE 2.0 (Vista version): The current version is 2.1 (Vista SP1, Win Server 2008) and is available to everyone!

• Essential Boot CD Thread on Slashdot listing many interesting and useful CDs
• Windows PE is the (available only to enterprise) "Windows Pre-Installation Environment", essentially a bootable Live CD with Vista on it. As an ActionPack subscriber, I have access to the oem tools section on Microsoft, and was able to download it.
• Spinrite 6 is the well-regarded hard disk recovery and analysis program by uber programmer Steve Gibson. Old school assembly language, device-level coder. Awesome.
• Gibson also researches Windows security issues with exciting detail, then provides solutions like this Windows Meta File backdoor thing and Firewall Testing. Hee hee! AND he now does a Security podcast that I will have to check out.
• Memtest 86+ is the thorough memory tester that everyone needs to run to rule out bad RAM.
• Spybot Search and Destroy is a useful set of tools for spyware detection that is well-known enough to be trustworthy, unlike the zillions of other solutions that pop up on the Internet. The page of related links on the site also is worth investigating, if you're a "follow the chain of trust" kind of person.
• Bart's Pre-Install Windows Environment or BartsPE is similar to Windows PE, except it's a graphical UI. I am about to build one of these. To install on USB, use [Bart's Utility][6a] or CodeBeetle's Utility. I tried CodeBeetle's utility, it seems to work.
• [System Rescue CD][7] is useful for booting Linux and performing low-level maintenance on the disk level, or so I'm told. I haven't tried it personally.
• Knoppix is another bootable Linux Live CD that I hear about a lot. Haven't tried it yet.
• UBCD4Win is another bootable Windows CD, based on BartsPE and loaded with other tools. The list of included tools is interesting in itself to see the author's recommendations, rather than wading through the zillions of tools on the Net.
• An Impressive List of Utilities is listed on Hiren's BootCD, but this is not legal to download software. Still, it is a good look at what an accomplished hacker considers worthy to be in his bag of tricks.
• DBAN is a hard disk wiper, boots from a floppy.
• AdAware is the other scanner program that gets mentioned a lot for SpyWare.
• HijackThis is a registry tool that tools you exactly what has gotten changed when you install software.
• RootKit Revealer is a SysInternals now Microsoft tool to find rootkits.
• What Anti-Spyware Tools work from USB Sticks?...useful!
• Read about Spyware on Wikipedia
• Sunbelt Software has an interesting-looking blog on security and exploits