EasyBCD 2.0

EasyBCD 2.0 (free) is the best available , hands down, for managing and repairing a multiboot computer system. If you already use a multiboot system—for example, running XP in one partition, in another, and Linux in a third—then you'll want to use this well-designed, easy-to-use front end for Windows' obscure command-line tools. If you don't have a multiboot system, and if you think that only expert users would ever want one, think again. EasyBCD makes it possible to add powerful disk recovery tools to your system, so that even if your Windows system has been corrupted by a virus, you can boot into a Microsoft or third-party recovery tool and restore your system without hunting down a recovery CD. All in all, it's an excellent tool, made even greater by the fact that it's absolutely free.

Understanding Multiboot
If you've never seen a multiboot Windows PC in action, you'll need to visualize how it works before you can understand how EasyBCD operates. When you start up a multiboot PC, it displays a menu of operating systems you can boot to. These might include, for example, Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7, with the default operating system highlighted (typically, the operating system you installed most recently will be the default). You can use the arrow keys to move up and down the list of operating systems, and press Enter to boot into the one you choose (or simply wait a few seconds for the default operating system to boot). The System applet in Windows' Control Panel lets you change the default OS and the number of seconds that the menu appears before booting automatically into the default OS. But if you want to make any other changes in the boot menu, you'll need to use some expert-level command-line tools courtesy of Windows or a third-party utility like EasyBCD. By the way, EasyBCD gets its name from Boot Configuration Data (BCD), the name of the data store that Windows uses to keep track of the operating systems installed on your disk.

Installation
You can install EasyBCD on a Windows XP, Windows Vista, or Windows 7 PC, and you can run it under any version of Windows on your disk. When you start up EasyBCD, it displays a list of the OSes on your boot menu. If your boot menu is exactly what you want it to be, then use EasyBCD to make a backup of your BCD data. But you'll probably want to use EasyBCD's options to rename one or more of the boot menu entries. For example, if you install Windows 7 on a machine that already has XP installed on a different partition, your boot menu will have two entries: The Windows 7 entry will be named "Microsoft Windows 7," but with the Windows XP entr will be unhelpfully tagged as the generic "Older version of Windows." You can use EasyBCD to change this name to "Windows XP SP3," or whatever name you prefer, for easy identification.

Reinstalls and Repairs
If you ever need to reinstall or repair Windows 7 on a dual-boot system, the Windows installer will almost certainly wipe out the boot-menu entry for Windows XP. The built-in BCD repair tools supplied by Windows won't automatically restore Windows XP, so unless you use EasyBCD, you'll have to search the Web for an obscure series of commands that will recreate the lost XP menu entry. EasyBCD, however, can restore it with one click.

Also, if you ever need to reinstall, EasyBCD can save you from a highly annoying Catch-22. When you reinstall Windows XP, the Windows installer wipes out the Windows 7 bootloading software, so you won't be able to boot into Windows 7. You can use the repair tools on the Windows 7 installation DVD to make Windows 7 bootable again—but the Windows 7 repair tools will make your newly-installed XP system unbootable. With a couple of clicks, EasyBCD's "Bootloader Setup" menu can restore the software needed to boot to both XP and Windows 7.

Antivirus and Recovery Tools
This is only the start of what EasyBCD can do. I used it to add third-party and system-backup recovery tools to my Windows boot menu. Now I can boot into those tools from my hard disk, instead of from a recovery CD. This means I can carry a complete set of recovery tools with me on my laptop without carrying CDs or a CD drive on the road. EasyBCD's help menus aren't highly detailed, so I had browse the program's help forum before I was clear on all the options.

Here's how I added recovery tools to my Windows boot menu using EasyBCD. Both ($69.99 direct, ) and ($89.95 direct, )—the security and backup tools that I rely on—have bootable CD images (.ISO files) available on their website for download by registered users. I put copies of those images on my laptop and used EasyBCD's "Add New Entry" menu to add entries to my boot menu for each of those .ISO files. I chose the option to load the image from memory, so that the image ran as if from a physical CD. I could modify the hard disk, or even restore it from a backup image—something that Windows would have prevented if I had run the recovery tool directly from the disk. For super-advanced users who know how to build their own Windows Preinstallation Environment disks, EasyBCD also includes an option for adding a WinPE file to the Windows boot menu. Further options let you boot .ISO images from USB disks. EasyBCD's

How Does it Stack Up?
EasyBCD's main rival is ($8.95-24.95 direct, ), which I praised in a review earlier this year. DualBootPro is a well-written, elegant program, but it has a much more limited feature set than EasyBCD. Unlike EasyBCD, DualBootPro doesn't include the kind of features that add CD images and WinPE images to the boot menu. Furthermore, DualBootPro costs $9.95, and EasyBCD is free.

I happily paid ten bucks for DualBootPro, but now that EasyBCD 2.0 is available, I'm even happier to get those features for nothing. No advanced Windows user should be without this powerful and elegant utility. Whether you're an advanced home user or taking care of IT for a small business, Editors' Choice utility EasyBCD ought to be a part of your Windows toolkit.

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