Boot Repair Disk

More Tools

In the event that hardware problems cause difficulties when booting a computer, Boot Repair Disk comes with two graphical diagnostic tools in the form of HardInfo and GParted. HardInfo, which you will find under the System Tools menu labeled System Profiler and Benchmark, clearly visualizes the hardware in a two-pane window and also performs benchmarks. GParted, on the other hand, helps to manage the storage devices. This is where you can, for example, identify problems arising from incorrect formatting or damaged filesystems (Figure 7).

Figure 7: HardInfo displays the hardware and modules installed in the computer.

Desktop

Besides the tools for repairing the system, you will only find a few preinstalled applications. Office applications, games, multimedia, and educational applications are missing completely. The Accessories menu contains entries for the LX terminal, the Leafpad text editor, and the PCManFM file manager.

You can launch Firefox from the Internet menu, and the usual LXDE configuration dialogs are found below the Preferences menu. As a special feature, the System Tools menu offers the Synaptic package manager, which provides access to the Lubuntu repositories, if you need additional software.

Hands-On

In our practical tests, the system was totally convincing. It not only successfully restored damaged boot sectors in Linux-only installations, but also repaired a mixed system with one Windows and two Linux partitions.

Also the OS Uninstaller enormously simplifies administrative tasks: In our lab, it always reliably completed the desired tasks on multiple machines with a variety of shared storage devices, thus removing the need for time-consuming manual deletion and modification of the partition table, as well as the GRUB configuration files.

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