It can be CD or DVD medium. Please specify and include a brief explanation why. Paid or free makes no difference. For me, it's without question my ShadowProtect Recovery CD, followed closely by Partition Wizard. The two combined are a match made in computer maintenance heaven
Operating system...without it, I'd have no OS to maintain in the first place. Every time I use it it's 100% effective. For the 3rd party/other category, I've use UBCD a few times. Yeah, a couple of those times it helped, other times..nada. So it's hardly 100% effective. Hard drive partitioning I do from Windows based apps...like Acronis or Paragon...right from within Windows, does the work on a reboot. So no CD there. I've tried burning CDs of malware removal tools, they seem to really amount to nothing..a waste of time. Best method of cleaning/repairing is to slave the infected hard drive to a machine quite a few updated removal tools.
Apart from the ones I've made up myself with tools like Sleuth Kit/Autopsy, EnCase etc I have various on disk and usb, ERD Commander 2005 and Microsoft Diagnostics and Recovery Toolset. Active@ Boot Disk (which is a very nice boot disk.) Knoppix/Helix BackTrack DEFT ...the beat goes on...
