Paragon Rescue Kit 14 Free Edition is a professional disaster recovery toolkit that could be all you need to get an unbootable PC working again.

The software arrives as a single executable. There's no installation required, just launch it, follow the wizard, create your very own bootable Linux or Windows PE recovery environment, and save it to a USB key or (if you chose Linux) an ISO file.

Boot from the Rescue Kit and a menu presents you with various recovery options. If your PC can't find the system drive, for example, you might start with the Undelete Partition tool, which detects and recovers accidentally deleted partitions.

The Boot Corrector is able to detect and fix problems with the Master Boot Record, partition table, boot.ini/ Boot Configuration Data files, EFI boot entries and more.

If you've forgotten your password, the Password Cleaner will reset it, giving you access to your system again.

A Registry Editor allows you to edit your PC's Registry, very helpful if you know a corrupted setting is causing your problems.

New features this time include the ability to back up your system to/ restore it from a virtual disk (VHD, pVHD, VMDK, VHDX).

In addition, the Linux boot environment can migrate a Windows system to a different hardware platform (including support for UEFI), and the Rescue Kit is now fully compatible with Windows 8.1.