Quote Originally Posted by adam_chevyss View Post
As some of you know I am currently attending school for network admin. Well one day we took a tour of the server room and got a chance to ask questions to the lead IT Tech. One question was what is the best or most useful software for diagnostics and for system recovery and we were told that ERD Commander was hard to beat, but is no longer made. Are there alternatives which are on par or better than ERD Commander and also maybe something that is easily customizable to the users or IT Professionals needs?
I don't use ERD too much, always used stuff like Ultimate boot, bartpe, knoppix and a host of other tools. For fighting virus and malware, a linux system configured with a good scanner is always good.

It really depends on what you are trying to do. For hardware diags, a good general disk is Ultamate boot. You can also reset passwords with it. For file system recovery I've always kept a copoy of Knoppix or bartpe handy.