Ultimate Recovery Environment for Windows PCs

today I'm going to show you the ultimate recovery environment for Windows PCS this is kind of like Windows recovery if it were're on steroids stay tuned in several videos you've probably heard me mention hiren's boot CD in fact I've actually used it in quite a few videos but I've never made a video dedicated to the usefulness of this boot environment This truly is a boot CD that everyone should have in their Arsenal so today I'm going to go over what it is and why you should download it but first we got to pay some bills so check out today's sponsor is your copy of Windows 10 unactivated well it doesn't have to be because with today's sponsor vipd key you can get a valid Windows 10 license for under $20 stop dealing with that stupid watermark on the desktop the valid license for Windows 10 also with an activated copy of Windows 10 you can upgrade to Windows 11 for free just go to the link in the description below and pick up a valid Windows 10 license key during checkout use the code cyber CPU for a 25% discount once you have your key go to your activation settings in Windows 10 and click on the link that says change product key enter the product key you just purchased and hit activate now you don't have to deal with that stupid Watermark that come with running an unactivated copy of Windows 10 now on with the video now you know what it seems like nothing good comes without controversy and this is the case with hen's boot CD so before we really dig into this video I really need to take some time to explain this controversy and the reality behind it Hon's boot CD started out as a multi-boot recovery CD that included options to boot into a customized Windows 98 and a customized mini Windows XP as well as numerous Doss utilities however it had a really bad reputation for including pirated retail programs and to be honest with you I don't know when the first version of Hon's boot CD was released but in my research I found references to version five coming out in 2004 this also is the oldest version that you can find archived online from what I could find at least I don't know maybe version 5 was the first version and but I'm really not sure why they skipped version 1 through four but if you know the history prior to version five then make sure you mention it down in the comments below one of the biggest issues with trying to piece together the history of hyon's boot CD was that it was shunned by many people because of its use of pirated software many support forms wouldn't even allow you to mention it without getting your thread closed or even deleted however with most things that develop a bad reputation it's kind of hard to eliminate that reputation once it's been created and in this case that's what happened to hen's boot CD starting in version 11 which was released around 2010 all of the pirated software was removed but its reputation remained also it it's kind of a gray area considering the fact that it still included a version of Windows 98 nxp which of course themselves are retail software however sometime between 2010 and 2012 Windows 98 was removed and the CD simply contained a mini version of Windows XP which technically was still pirated but you know official development of hen's boot CD simply ceased in 2012 with version 15 .2 and to this day this is the last official release of Hon's boot CD that's available I honestly don't think there's a straight answer to why it ceased new versions just simply stopped coming out in fact if you look at the original developers website it's kind of a hodgepodge of random things including Baby backgrounds and numerous posts of jokes unfortunately no explanation for why the development of hen's boot CD ceased who knows maybe the developer died or was a arrested for software piracy we may never know so at this point Hon's boot CD was essentially a live Windows XP CD with a lot of freeware and shareware utilities that could be used to repair computers it was a pretty handy recovery environment for its time and there was a lot of unofficial releases as well but unfortunately in 2023 a Windows XP recovery CD isn't very helpful luckily a popular archive and mirror for hyon's boot CD that was started in 2010 decided that they were going to take the Reigns and create an entirely new hn boot CD based on Windows 10 this new version of hyn is simply called hyn boot CD PE and it's because it's based on the Windows 10 pre-installation environment and just like Hon's boot CD from the past it's packed with freeware and shareware software that can be used to fix or recover Windows based PCS now while the original hyn boot CD never really shook its reputation for containing pirated software because technically they never really got rid of all of it considering it included Windows XP which was clearly not licensed Hon's boot CD PE gets around this problem by using the Windows 10 pre-installation environment that is licensed for Recovery purposes and because of that the use of Windows PE in the new hn boot CD doesn't violate the windows PE license so while hen's boot CD still has a reputation of being a environment that uses pirated software it in reality the new hyn boot CD is perfectly legal and no longer contains any pirated software at all and I know this reputation survives because I've heard many people mention it in the comments of previous videos when I've used it so anyway now that we've got that controversy out of the way let's jump on the computer and I'll show you how to use it so as you can see we're actually in Windows 11 right now and the reason for this is is because we need to actually create a USB drive with hen's boot CD on it I'm going to show you how to do that the first thing you're going to need to do is open up your browser and go to hyn boot cd. org and this is the website these are actually the people that are currently developing hn boot CD PE which is in version 1.02 at the moment so what you do is once you get to this page you go over to the download and you scroll all the way down and you click right here where it shows the iso and I'm going to start downloading this first because it's a pretty big ISO it's almost three gigs so we're going to get that downloaded while we go to the next tool that we need which is Rufus and we've I've shown you how to use Rufus before but I'm going to go over it again real quick what I recommend is once you go to rufus's website you scroll down and get this one right here with the p on it the p is the portable version the standard one just installs it on your computer both of them will work but I like to use the portable version so we're going to go ahead and click on that and we're going to let that download real quick okay so once we get these downloaded we can go ahead and minimize our browser and then we're going to go want to go into our downloads folder where both of our programs are right here so as you can see we've got hen's boot CD the dis image right here and we've got Rufus so what we're going to want to do is go ahead and launch Rufus and when you do go ahead and say yes to the user account control and then from here once Rufus opens and there it is okay you're going to get this question when it first launches and I would just say yes and go ahead and run the program now obviously we need a USB drive so I'm going to go ahead and plug a USB drive in real quick and the USB drive that you're going to need for this is going to be a minimum of 4 gigs because obviously the iso is a 3 gbyte ISO and I don't think they make 3 gigabyte USB drives but if they do that would probably work too but I would find yourself one that's four gigs or bigger I'm going to be using an 8 gig in this one so once you do that go ahead and push the select button so we can select the iso and we're going to go ahead and go to our downloads folder here and select the hn boot CD ISO and click on open and then once you do that what I would recommend right here is for the partition scheme I would change this from GPT to MBR now when it comes to MBR versus GPT the reason why I recommend MBR is because you can still boot through ufi it's just that it'll also allow you to boot through Master boot record or NBR so it'll make the USB that you're creating a little more Universal so anyway let's get back to it all right once you make those selections you just go ahead and push start and then it's going to warn you that it's going to destroy all the data on the drive that's okay hit okay make sure you're not doing this on a drive that has information on it that you care about because it will destroy all the data on the device so we hit okay and hit okay again if you get this error and there we go it's going to start creating it now now it's going to take a minute for this to create so I'm just going to skip ahead and I'll meet you in hen's boot CD okay so once you boot into hn the first thing you're going to see is your little Network set setting up and then once this is set up then usually you should have network access as long as your ethernet drivers or whatever other network device that you have is functioning if you want to use Wi-Fi you have to come down here to the network icon you can click on it there and then you can actually set it up to connect to Wi-Fi unfortunately I don't have Wi-Fi so I can't show you how to set that up however now that we're in it I want to kind of go through and show you some of the stuff it comes with as you can see it essentially looks like Windows 10 it has a Windows 7ish style start menu in it but it is a strip down light version of Windows 10 and essentially all this is is Windows PE but as you look around you can see that you have your browser installed so you have Chrome and Firefox so depending on which browser you like to use you have access to that so you can always search the internet if there's some problem that you're trying to solve that you need the Internet for you do have access to browsers right here so you can click on and you have internet access fairly easily right here and then also it operates similar to a regular Windows computer so you have your this PC which essentially has access to all your different drives and things of that nature now I've noticed that when hn Boots up it always uses the C drive as this is your actual computer's hard drive so this is the hard drive for the computer that you're trying to work on and then hen's actual boot Drive is this one it's the X drive and then your USB drive that has hns on it is the Y drive but this is essentially how your mic computer is set up in any other system and it'll give you access to different resources on the system that you're working on so if you're just wanting to boot up in order to access some of the user files or something like that you can easily do it just like this however I'm going to go through some of the programs and utilities this thing comes with because that's the reason why we're here so we're going to go ahead and close my computer and we're going to open up utilities right here and also these utilities are also accessible from the start menu if you click on all programs it's exactly the same stuff as we're going through here I'm just doing it here because it's a little bit it's organized a little bit better so I can show you what's going on now from the accessibilities menu essentially all you have is a couple of different accessibility Tools in here but you have to keep in mind this is not intended to be an operating system that you use this is a recovery environment so they really don't have a ton of different accessibility features in here so if we jump back and we go to accessories as you can see you'll see a lot of different Windows access accessories here like your dis management your calculator and notepad things of that nature as well as reg edit and then moving on from here if we jump back into our main menu here we can go into administrative tools this is going to be related to hiren's boot CD specifically so like the computer management control panel device manager and stuff like that isn't going to be for the computer you're you're actually on but the recovery environment itself and now that I've noticed it there is one thing that's missing from here that I guess you can't can only get from the start menu so if you go into the start menu here go into the administrative tools you'll see the windows memory diagnostic is in here and this is really useful for systems if you think you might have a memory problem or something like that however there are better tools than the windows memory diagnostic that can be used but you know what we've covered that in videos in the past so if we move back now from utilities we go into the the BCD and MVR tools and then these right here honestly I've never actually used them so I don't know how well they work but they've got two different programs here boot ice and easy BCD and you know they might be good tools let me know down in the comments below what you think if you've used these before otherwise let's move on to the next one so in here we got hard drive tools and this one has a ton of different stuff in here so if you come through here you've got anything from data recovery to defrag diagnostic for hard drives and storage devices you have Imaging for copying hard drives partitioning tools and security so if we we go through here from data recovery you can see we got tons of different data recovery programs in fact we even have Rua which this is a program we covered in a video a couple weeks ago but there's tons of other different programs in here that you can use in fact photo is also another really good data recovery program that you can check out so if we scroll back into hard drive tools and go into defrag it essentially comes with a defragger but you know what on Modern computers with ssds def fraggers are pretty much worthless but if we go into diagnostic there are several different Tools in here that are actually very useful one of them happens to be Crystal dis info which I've covered in the past but this program here essentially gives you your your different smart readouts from your hard drive itself so if you think you might have a bad hard drive and that's what's stopping you from booting into Windows well this is a great way to diagnose it so if we go back into hard drive tools we can now go into Imaging which if you happen to have a bad hard drive then imaging software is kind of important at this point so one of the ones that I recommend is aonis True Image is a really good program and what you might notice right here is aonis well aonis is a retail program and I thought I said earlier that there was no retail programs inside of this recovery image well that is true if you go into aonis right here and you go into about you'll see that this is an unregistered trial version so if you'd like to use the full version of aonis then you'd have to provide your own serial number in order to use it inside of hyn but they do keep the free version of acronis in here so hopefully that'll be useful to you but it is a very good program for Imaging also I've used Drive image XML before and this one is a pretty good program for backup for the most part but they've got several different programs in here that you can use to image different hard drives so if we move back into hard drive tools let's go into partitioning tools and this one right here I haven't tried all of these programs in here but I have used eus partition master and this is a great program for messing with partitions in fact I actually used this right before starting filming on this video in order to you know clean the partitions up off of my USB thumb drive that I was using for the video but either way this is a great program for doing partitioning and this is a program that I've used in previous videos so moving right along we're going to go ahead and back all the way back into utilities and we're going to go into Network Tools and then one of the things that I wanted to point out in this is if you go into this PC and if you noticed before it has all the different functions of a regular pc however if you click on map network drives it looks like you can map a drive on a network but it doesn't work and I've tried for ages to try to figure out how to make this work and it just simply doesn't work however while I Was preparing for this video I actually figured out a way to make it work so what you do is don't go to the regular Windows map network drive because like I said it doesn't work so what you do is instead you go to PE Network this little program right here and when you open this one up you go down into network drives and then from network drives you can essentially create a network drive right here so I'm going to say we're going to go Z and for path we're going to go to my Nas so we'll just go into my data directory and then for username and password I'm going to go ahead and type that real quick and we're going to push connect and and as you can see it gives you this little window and what you'll have to do is at that point you just hit cancel and then if you go back into this program again which for some reason for me it's not opening up there we go successfully mapped and then you hit okay and it shows you it show shows that it's mapped so if we actually open up this PC now you'll see that now we do in fact have a mapped network drive so moving right along from there we're going go ahead and close this and also if you wanted to go through this this has tons of different settings that you can do in order to change different network information and things of that nature for Windows PE itself however for the most part it's pretty much worthless unless you're wanting to map network drives to be able to backup data from A system that you're trying to recover other than that I haven't found much other uses for this because like I said this is a recovery environment it's not meant to be a full-fledged PC so I'm going to go ahead and close that and we're going to go ahead and back off now and go into other tools right here and from other tools as you can see this is a lot of free reware we've got VLC media player we have szip we have notepad++ so it has a lot of different programs that you may need in the process of repairing a system so if we back up out of here and then we go into removable Drive tools this will essentially give us a copy of Roofus and CD burner XP now most systems nowadays aren't going to have a CD burner but this one's a really really good program if you are trying to create a CD for whatever reason in fact it's the program that I recommend to burn CDs with and then Rufus well you know what Rufus is is because we had to use that before we even got into here so if we back up now and we go into security this will give you a bunch of different programs that you can use for different repairs that you're trying to do to different systems like for instance we have an antivirus folder where we have multiple different antiviruses that we can run offline scans on our regular Windows hard drive if we need to so if we think for whatever reason we want to run an offline scan this is the way to do it right here and then if we back off here and we go into keyfinders you can see we can actually show different product keys and things of that nature that we may want to find from within windows and then if we back off and then go into passwords we can actually change our regular password for Windows now I haven't actually tried to use any of these programs but I'm assuming they work pretty good this program right here it identifies all of the different user accounts and I'm going to have to test it out one of these days to see if it works well but I've got other tools that I've used used in the past either way let me know in the comments below if you've used this and how well it works for you so moving on from there we can go ahead and close this and go back into utilities and then we can go into system tools right here and from system tools as you can see this is a lot of really important stuff like command prompt our Powershell and things of that nature that we may need to use in order to fix different computers and we also have Hardware info so if we go into there you can go into CPU Z Hardware Z Hardware info and space spey I you know I've used the program before and it's a good program but I don't know how to pronounce the name if you do let me know in the comments below but backing up right here we also have the entire system system Eternal Suite so we can go through and do essentially everything that we need to do from the different CIS internal Suite but you know what these programs right here I'm going to have to do a separate video on just these different programs because there's tons of different stuff that you can do with these things so I'm not going to waste this video on that we're going to do that in a different video so backing up here next next thing we're going to go into is Windows recovery and if you go into Windows recovery essentially it has one program it's this lay soft Windows recovery and to be perfectly honest with you I've never used it before so it may be really good I don't know but let me know in the comments below if you've used it now if you've seen the pattern right here I use hen's boot CD for really specific things normally it's backing up systems that I just can't save for whatever reason and I need to get the data off of them or it could be for using the partitioning tools to be able to change the different partitions to help me boot the system if I'm having problems booting I haven't used every program that comes with hen's boot CD I mean it comes with a lot so there's a lot to use so there's many programs that I've mentioned that I plan to use at some point at least I plan to test at some point but I haven't yet but if you've used them let me know in the comments Below on what you think and what some of your favorite programs in hn is so let's get back to it and I'm going to show you some other stuff you can do with this okay so moving along there's one more thing that I wanted to show you guys and this one right here is really good going to go ahead and close everything now the next thing I want to show you is how to run systemer store from hen's boot CD because running systemer store from another operating system doesn't really work however it can if you do it this way so go ahead and open your command prompt and once you have the command prompt open you want to type rst rui .exe now if you just run that by itself obviously it's going to give you an error to use system restore you must specify which installation to restore well let me show you how to do that so I'm going to go ahead and enter that again and then we want to click forward slash offline because we're wanting to use the offline operating system and then we want to tell it where that is so go ahead and do colon c colon back slash windows and then when you hit enter ENT it'll go ahead and start system restore for you and then from there you there you can hit next and as you can see I went ahead and did a sample restore point just for the purpose of this video and then in order to run it all you got to do is click on it click next and it'll run system restore so as you can see hen's boot CD is an amazing resource for people who repair computers unfortunately back in its Heyday I never used it because I was one of those people that didn't want to use a recovery environment with a bunch of pirated softare W however I'm glad it's been given new life and it's now likely the most usable recovery environment available so this is definitely a tool that you should have in Your Arsenal the question now is will there be a Windows 11 version I don't know I guess we're going to have to wait and see but with all that said if you're starting to build up a pretty good collection of bootable USB thumb drives and you'd like to have a better way to organize them other than just throwing them in a drawer and hoping you can find the one you're looking for later then check out this video where I set up a utility that can boot multiple isos from just one single thumb drive it's actually a really helpful tool just make sure that you have a pretty good size thumb drive for all those isos as always you guys have a great day

Channel: CyberCPU Tech

Views: 112,020

Keywords: hirens boot cd, windows recovery cd, windows repair cd, usb recovery, hirens boot cd pe, recovery cd on usb drive, rufus

Id: KcFANbzgyoo

Length: 23min 20sec (1400 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 09 2023