Add to Chrome
Add to Edge
Add to Firefox
Add to Opera
Add to Brave
Add to SafariWhen comparing Hiren's Boot CD vs System Rescue CD, the Slant community recommends Hiren's Boot CD for most people. In the question“What are the best system rescue discs for Windows?” Hiren's Boot CD is ranked 2nd while System Rescue CD is ranked 3rd. The most important reason people chose Hiren's Boot CD is:
Hiren's Boot CD is completely free, always has been and always will be.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Completely free
Hiren's Boot CD is completely free, always has been and always will be.
Pro Hiren Boot PE
It is the latest.
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 only IT tool of every usage, made by a professional and covering all aspects of system's maintainance
Its "popularity" is not a reason to add any PRO. It has gained its popularity because of high level making. Most of that popularity was at the time it included all commercial products such as Acronis, Paragon, Symantec, etc.. It's only after version 10.4 that those apps were dropped out.
There is also no reason to qualify it in CON only because it's outdated as it was discontinued years ago.
For users that still run Win XP or Win 7 it's still relevant in most cases. You just have to realize that it was built at a time when common systems was based on x86 architecture, not x64 one.
Pro It's UEFI compatible and often updated
Pro Cross-platform
System Rescue CD can troubleshoot both Windows and Linux systems.
Pro Supports a lot of file systems
System Rescue CD supports quite a lot of different file systems, including network file systems (like NFS).
Cons
Con Productkey hacking tool found during installation
Worth mentioning that tools on this disc can create false positives in anti-virus softwares though.
Con It's not free
Paid over 20$, it is useless, period.
Con Not a Hirens creation
Hirens did not make this. This is FAN MADE and it's kinda slimy to use Hirens name on it.
Con Went through a bad OS migration
Dropped all useful features when it migrated from Gentoo to Arch. has been mostly useless for a few years now.
Con Not very user friendly
Sometimes graphically-challenged machines will force System Rescue CD into a text-only mode which can be a bit of a challenge to use.
