Troubleshooting & Rescue Tools

Here is a summary of some of the troubleshooting tips and  tools available from Microsoft or third parties for free.  Note that for third party tools you can download an "iso" file that can be burned directly to a CD (or DVD if size requires it), or you can use a USB boot tool (see my other post on creating bootable USB drives).  The Yumi tool has built in links to all the troubleshooting tools it supports!

If you need to backup,  troubleshoot or recover Windows 8.1/10 (or need to reinstall it) go to this post "Creating Windows Recovery Media..." first.

For tips on the care of your PC or Laptop and protecting against viruses and malware see my post on The Care and Feeding of Your PC.

System Rescue CD is a bootable CD with lots of disk recovery utilities including SFDisk, SFArchiver, Partimage, TestDisk, PhotoRec, and iftp.  It also has the system tools GParted, CNU-Parted, and GRUB.  There are also file system tools for each file system such as XSFProgs, JFSProgs...  Midnight Commander is included as well.  Firefox is installed as well as a number of network tools.  An ISO file can be downloaded and burned to a regular CD so it can be used to boot older systems without DVD capability, only CD capability.
Link to SystemRescueCD Site:

http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page

Link to SystemRescueCD online manual:

http://www.sysresccd.org/Online-Manual-EN

SARDU (Shardana Antivirus Rescue Disk Utility) is a small freeware utility designed to combine all of your bootable ISOs and turn them into a single ISO with a boot menu. You can either burn this ISO to a single CD/DVD, or you can get SARDU to create it for a bootable USB drive. Basically, this aims to eliminate the need to carry around heaps of different bootable CDs.
Despite having “Antivirus Rescue Disk utility” in its name, it is not limited to just running Antivirus boot CDs. You can also include other tools like GParted, Ophcrack, UBCD4Win and various Linux live CDs. Note that you will need to download and install SARDU's ISO creation utility, then download the various ISO files of the other utilities you want to combine onto a SARDO ISO file.  Only problem is most SARDU created ISOs are too large to fit on a CD and must be burned to a DVD, which then only can be used to boot a PC with a DVD drive...  

Link to SARDU Site:

http://www.sarducd.it/

TestDisk and PhotoRec are utilities included on the SARDU, System Rescue CD, Windows PE (XP Live) CDs.  Link to TestDisk Site:

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

Instructions for using TestDisk:

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Step_By_Step

This Recovery example guides you through PhotoRec step by step to recover deleted files or lost data from a reformatted partition or corrupted file system:

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec_Step_By_Step

Total Commander is a text based file manager also bundled with some of the recovery CD packages.  It has two window file management for comparison use. 
Link to TotalCommander Site:

http://www.ghisler.com/index.htm

Midnight Commander Tutorial

Autoruns from Microsoft Sysinternals

This utility from Microsoft Technet Sysinternals has the most comprehensive knowledge of auto-starting locations of any startup monitor, and shows you what programs are configured to run during system bootup or login, and when you start various built-in Windows applications like Internet Explorer, Explorer and media players. These programs and drivers include ones in your startup folder, Run, RunOnce, and other Registry keys. Autoruns reports Explorer shell extensions, toolbars, browser helper objects, Winlogon notifications, auto-start services, and much more. Autoruns goes way beyond other autostart utilities.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb963902.aspx

Microsoft Windows Support/Troubleshooting (Microsoft Docs):

Win 8.1: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/it-pro/windows-8.1-and-8/hh832030(v=ws.11)
Win 10:  https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows

Fixing the Master Boot Record in Windows

If your PC fails to boot, or you have deleted the Linux partitions in a Grub dual boot environment you will need to use Windows recovery media to fix the MBR.  Here is my post on how to do that.