What PC based tools (CD's/DVD's) do you use?

[alank2]

Hi,

So I found out this device will mount an ISO image and present itself as a virtual optical drive. 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817379026

I've got an idea of some CD's/DVD's/ISO's I want to put on it.  I like the idea that it emulates an optical drive and you just copy ISO's to it and select which one you want it to mount and present.  I ordered one and haven't tried it yet, but in a few days I'll be trying it out.

I'm definitely going to put gparted on it along with acronis for backup/restoring, maybe some bootable virus iso's.

What tools do you guys use for PC management I should try out?

[NiHaoMike]

UBCD and Knoppix (both on USBs) are the ones I use. Haven't used an optical disc in a long time.

BTW, Sandisk used to make a USB drive that had the option of emulating a CD/DVD drive. Such a device would have been very useful for making bootable USBs from ISOs without having to hack the ISOs.

[Skimask]

CloneZilla (older version for XP & earlier machines, newest version for Vista and up plus Linux and other variants)
Acronis (whatever the latest version is)
SpinRite (although I actually believe it's "snake-oil", I've personally seen too many instances where it actually worked)
UBCD (various versions)
Ubuntu on a USB stick (whatever the latest version is)
Pride-and-Joy = Homebuilt IDE->IDE drive copier (works with SATA adapters and newer 4K block drives as well), slow, not pretty, but doesn't require any operating system or any user input other than plugging it in, turning it on, and pressing the start button.  Programmed it also to handle "bad" sectors by reading and re-reading the "bad" sector continuously until I get a 99% confidence factor on every bit in the sector (eg. 99 reads out of 100 are the same).  As long as the drive is physically able to read sectors, I'll can get data out of it.  It's brought back some pretty bad ones from the grave more than once.
...a handful of others...

[rdl]

I don't get it. It just an external USB drive enclosure. You still need to put a 2.5" drive in it. Why not just use something like 7-zip to copy your optical disks to a regular HDD. It'd be cheaper. There are also programs that will mount an iso file as a virtual disk.

[alank2]

I don't get it. It just an external USB drive enclosure. You still need to put a 2.5" drive in it. Why not just use something like 7-zip to copy your optical disks to a regular HDD. It'd be cheaper. There are also programs that will mount an iso file as a virtual disk.

It acts like it is a USB optical drive to your system at boot time.  So you can boot ISO images from a hard drive as if it were real optical media in an optical drive, but it is faster and no burning or finding discs.  I've been using grub4dos and it will boot some iso's but not others.

[krivx]

Most modern BIOSes can boot from USB anyway...

[rdl]

Most modern BIOSes can boot from USB anyway...

...and optical discs are antique by modern PC standards and probably will soon be obsolete. Even Blu-Ray doesn't offer enough capacity per disk to be really useful.