Bootice

Bootice is a free portable utility by Pauly for installing, backing up, restoring and repairing the partition boot record (PBR) and master boot record (MBR) of the disks in your computer. You can first use Bootice to back up your boot records so you have a clean copy of your boot records before you start experimenting. Bootice works with internal and external hard drives, USB flash drives and disk image files (IMG, IMA, VHD, VHDX and VMDK), so you can work on almost any drive you have.

Bootice can write Grub4Dos, SysLinux, Plop and Windows NT 5.x/6.x boot code, which makes it popular for preparing bootable USB drives. It can also create VHD and VHDX virtual disks, including differencing disks, and attach or detach them in Windows.

Bootice is not necessarily the best program for beginners because it comes with no built-in help. But you can easily find instructions online for all of its features and you can easily learn what everything does with a bit of searching and reading.

The interface is clean and simple, with tabs for Physical disk, Disk image, BCD, Utilities, UEFI and Command line. Each tab starts with a short description of what it does, so you can learn the tools step by step.

If you are more familiar with this sort of tool you will be able to start working right away. Some of the more advanced functions that Bootice will allow you to do include editing disk sectors in hex, partitioning and formatting drives, filling a disk to erase its data, editing Grub4Dos menus, editing the Windows BCD store and managing UEFI boot entries.

Bootice is freeware for non-commercial use and may be redistributed without modifications. It runs on Windows 2000 and later, including Windows 10, in 32-bit and 64-bit editions, and also works in Windows PE. The last version, 1.3.4, was released in 2017, and the author's website is no longer online.

Bootice gathers MBR and PBR repair, partitioning, BCD editing and virtual disk tools in one portable program.