Emergency Boot CD
Emergency Boot CD is a powerful toolset to fix unbootable computers and recover data from them. It is a self-contained bootable OS on live CD with the following features:
1) File Manager, which is capable of saving files from local HDD to USB thumbdrive/HDD, and restoring them back if necessary. Supported filesystem types: FAT, NTFS, EXT2/EXT3, ISO9660, UDF and BSD UFS; Unicode is fully supported for all of them. Builtin editor and viewer for text files can handle numerous ANSI/OEM encodings and UTF-8/UTF-16. Removable disks e.g. USB and Firewire are mounted and dismounted automatically, like floppy disks in Windows.
2) Windows Password Wizard is a tool to solve various Windows logon problems, for example restore access to your PC when you forgot the password for Windows user account.
3) Registry Tools: the Registry Editor (which can edit Registry offline of Windows, so you can fix Registry even if Windows is broken and unbootable or can't update Registry because of security/ACL restrictions) and the Registry Defragmenter (which reorganizes Registry in such way that logically adjacent data is located physically nearby, so Registry of old Windows installations works faster).
4) Mount & Boot Center is a tool to fix various boot related problems: reassign and fix missing drive letters (mount points), including disk C:, in Windows installations; easily edit boot menus (boot.ini of NTLDR and BCD of Bootmgr); fix boot records and active partition flags. Also Mount & Boot Center can change disk signatures and GUIDs (in sync with MountedDevices key in SYSTEM hive and device descriptors in BCD hive) and resolve conflicts of disk signatures.
5) Partition Manager is a tool to create, format, delete and wipe partitions. Also it can backup partitions to image files, restore them back, and copy partition-to-partition.
If your computer does not have CD/DVD drive, EBCD can boot from USB.