Toolset Checks PC Health, Aids Recovery

The Diagnostics and Recovery Toolset (DART) provides tools for diagnosing and repairing unbootable Windows PCs and recovering lost or deleted data. The tools are run from a recovery disk. The latest version, DART 6.0, was released in Oct. 2008 with several new features, including support for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008, but it is not compatible with older Windows versions. Because of this lack of backward-compatibility, both DART 6.0 and 5.0 ship with the latest version of the Desktop Optimization Pack.

Rescuing Unbootable PCs

While hardware failures, such as a disk drive crash or motherboard failure, have straightforward repair options, software failures can be more difficult to diagnose and correct. If a PC will not boot, for example, the cause may not be obvious. Reloading the disk from a standard disk image is one way to recover, but some data, including critical files, may be lost and user customization will have to be redone. Reinstalling the OS and applications, which can preserve data files remaining on a disk, can be even more time-consuming and complicated further by BitLocker drive encryption, which ties the encryption mechanism to the hardware of the failing computer.