All in One Bootable CD covering all maintenance purposes, most importantly rescue disc purposes.
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Completely free
Hiren's boot CD is completely free, always has been and always will be.
Pro Extremely popular
Hiren's Boot CD is very popular. Anyone who has ever worked in support or system administration probably has used it at least once.
Because of this, it's extremely easy to find guides and tutorials on how to use it, or if a tutorial does not explain everything, chances are that you can find someone to help you with it.
Pro That PE was the ony IT tool of every usage, made by a professional and was covering all aspects of sytems maintains
its "popularity" is not a reason to add any PRO. its gain its popularity because its high level making. most of that popularity was at the time it was including all comercial products such Acronis, Paragon, Symantec, ect... its only after version 10.4 that those apps were dropped out.
there is also no reason to qualify it in CON only because of his outdated as it was aborted years ago.
for users that still run win XP or win7 its still relevant in most case. just have to realize that it was build at time that common systems was based x86 architecture not x64 one.
Cons
Con Not cross-platform
This rescue disc is for Windows systems only.
Con Trash, outdated
Only people who use this are old-school fanboys. Get with the times.
Con An oldie, no EFI support
Con Has not been updated in years
The last release was in 2012, which is quite old at this point.