5 Bootable ISO's to Boot and Repair Your Computer for Free

By Timothy Tibbetts

on 07/05/2023

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If your computer won't boot, not all is lost. There are five free apps that you can use to boot from CD, DVD, or a thumb drive to run diagnostics, make repairs remove malware, back up files, and more.

Because each app is similar, we'll start with our favorite and work backward, although there's no wrong choice here. Every one of these apps is 5-star rated on MajorGeeks by our readers.

1: Sergei Strelec's WinPE for Windows

Sergei Strelec's WinPE is a bootable repair and diagnostics image for maintenance of computers, partitioning, backup and restore, diagnostics, data recovery, and more.

2: Ultimate Boot CD

Ultimate Boot CD (UBCD) is a bootable ISO that consolidates as many diagnostic tools as possible into one bootable CD, DVD, or thumb drive. It is the most popular on MajorGeeks and is updated regularly.

3: UBCD4Win

UBCD4Win is a bootable CD that contains software that allows you to repair, restore, or diagnose almost any computer problem. It is the second most popular on MajorGeeks and is no longer updated. This shouldn't be a problem, and it might be your best bet for Windows 7 or XP when newer apps designed for Windows 10 don't work. UBCD4Win is based on the also no longer updated Bart's PE Builder.

4: Hiren’s BootCD PE

Hiren’s BootCD PE is an emergency diagnostic boot disk based on Windows 10 PE x64. It wasn't updated for six years but came back in 2018. Hiren's Boot CD includes drivers to get your network working.

5: SystemRescueCd

SystemRescueCd is a Linux system rescue disk available as a bootable CD-ROM or USB stick for administrating or repairing your system and data after a crash. It is Open Source and regularly updated.