Alternative to ERD Commander

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?:confused:

Bump

But as an upcoming soon to be Geek - you GOOGLED ERD Commander and found it anyway didn't you?

Or maybe you found-> ERD Commander Reborn as Microsoft Diagnostics and Recovery Toolkit in Winternals http://www.microsoft.com/communities...r=US&sloc=&p=1

Uh yeah I have it..... but I was wondering what was there was for new tools?

The former ERD Commander is now Diagnostics and Recovery Toolset (DaRT). It is included in Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP). It is available to TechNet+ subscribers for test and evaluation purposes, not production use.

Announcement

ERD Commander info

On our MSDNAA account there is a listing called Desktop Optimization Pack 2007. Too bad the 2009 isn't on there I will have to talk to one of my instructors to see if they can get it added like they did with Win 7 Pro. Thanks for the replies.

You want the 2009 R2 version to support Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2.

The software is on Technet so it should be on MSDN somewhere.

Yes it is on MSDN, but my MSDNAA, (MSDN Academic Account) does not allow me access to it. We have to login to a site with a list of software that is allowed for download for our school. I looked on our list and it only has the 2007 version and I tried to logon to MSDN, but My account doesn't allow it.

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Originally Posted by adam_chevyss

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?:confused:

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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.