1) The Perfect PC Rescue Tool Imagine: You hit the power switch on your Windows or Linux PC, and the system starts to boot, but stalls. The power's on, the hard drive is spinning, but nothing's happening. You restart the PC, but the same thing occurs. What next? You might try booting from your original operating system setup CD, or the "recovery CD" that some system vendors provide, or a generic preconfigured bootable CD such as those you can download from several online sites, or you could even try a classic, old-fashioned "boot floppy;" a floppy disk that contains just the essential files for a bare-bones restart of your PC. But all those approaches have major problems. The preconfigured CDs steer you in the directions their creators intend. For example, OS CDs steer you towards reinstalling the OS, and possibly losing your current setups or customizations. Vendor "Recovery" CDs steer you towards reinstalling the factory configuration, possibly losing not only your setup, but all your user data as well. Preconfigured bootable CDs give you the tools the CD creators thought you'd want, meaning it's a shot in the dark as to whether the tools will do what you need or not. And floppies--- while very handy--- hardly have room for any serious software at all, so you end up having to build a separate software library of floppy-based repair/diagnostic tools that could end up filling an entire drawer. There's a better way: A custom boot CD that you make yourself. It's not hard to do, and you end up with one slender CD that contains not only the necessary files to get your PC started, but that also contains everything you need to diagnose and repair almost any kind of system trouble. In fact, it can be packed with potentially as much as about 500 floppies' worth of software, all in one place, right at your fingertips. What's more, the CD isn't some kind of cookie-cutter, lowest-common-denominator tool, but one that suits your own specific preferences and needs; one that's customized for your own unique combination of hardware, software and skill level. In my own case, supporting about a dozen mixed Windows and Linux PCs, I've built customized DOS boot CDs that contain not only a full range--- hundreds of megabytes--- of diagnostic/repair/setup tools, but also hold copies of the drivers used by my PCs; plus copies of all my environment-specific configuration files and data. Here's a small example of how this can help: I have nine different brands of network cards in use on my office systems. My boot CD toolkit has a folder called NICS that contains nine subfolders, each holding all the driver files for one of the network card types. No matter what PC I'm working on, and no matter what OS is on any given machine, or what OS I may switch to, I have the correct network drivers instantly at hand. Same for audio, video, motherboard chipset, and other drivers; BIOS flash updates; and more. Everything--- and I mean everything--- is there on one CD. What a time saver! There are three major steps to the process of creating your own custom boot-CD toolkit, and I've written out the whole process in a two-part article that's running at http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=10700681 . The *last* step is actually burning everything onto a CD, and making it bootable: We'll cover that in Part Two (the next column), paying special attention to one way of creating a boot CD that helps ensure it can work properly even on older PCs that were among the first to support "boot from CD." The middle step is to gather the diagnostic/repair and other tools you want to put on the CD. We'll get to that later in the current InformationWeek column. But the first step, and the one we'll spend the most time on now, is picking the right kinds of boot files, and making them perfectly suit your needs. We'll focus on DOS-based boot setups because they'll allow low-level access to the hardware on any standard PC, running any OS; and because DOS based boot floppies are frankly simpler and easier to create and use than Linux floppies. (But if you wish, you can also build Linux-based boot disks, using similar general principles.) The easiest way to gather the files you need for your boot CD is to start by making a customized boot floppy from whichever version of Windows you have available. We'll show you, step-by-step, how to make custom DOS boot floppies for all versions of Windows--- Win98, WinME, Windows 2000 and XP. Yes, even the non-DOS versions of Windows can create DOS-based boot floppies, if you know how; and if you know which additional files you'll need; and where to get them. We'll give you all that information, and more, using all 100% legal and legitimate sources for the software. (Many "boot floppy" sites simply offer pirated versions of copyrighted DOS files. That's not OK, and we won't do that. The methods I'll show you are totally above board, non-pirated, and totally legitimate.) Please click over to http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=10700681 for this info, and for links to hundreds of DOS-based tools that can let you diagnose and repair almost any problem your PC is likely to run into. See you there!