Shardana SARDU

28 Oct 2009, in

Recently I came across a very useful tool that any system repairer should have in their toolbox. The tool is named SARDU(Shardana Anvirus Rescue Disk Utility) and is available from http://www.sarducd.it/

The tools it is set up to provide are:

Antivirus
  • Avira
  • Bit Defender
  • Dr. Web
  • F-Secure
  • GData
  • Kaspersky
  • Panda Security
  • VirusBlokAda
At the time of writing it can only automatically update the antivirus definitions on your USB stick for Avira, F-Secure and Kaspersky.

For Utilities it includes:
  • Windows 98 Boot Disk
  • Clonezilla
  • Gparted
  • NT Pwd
  • Parted Magic
  • System Rescue CD
  • Ultimate Boot CD
It also provides some small Linux Distros to use:
  • Austrumi
  • Damn Small Linux
  • NimbleX
  • Puppy Linux
  • Slax
And lastly it also allows you to use one of several available WinPE:
  • Live XP
  • Mega Lab CD
  • Windows PE
  • UBCD 4 Win
  • VistaPE
The utility is excellent and very easy to use. You get all the utilities you want to use(links are included on the site), place them in the iso folder and click the Make Bootable USB option and it'll start extracting and collating the files. It automatically detects which of its options you have in the iso folder(no need to click on the checkboxes) and will tick all the ones that apply. As it finishs processing each item it will turn the background color green so its easy to see where it is up to.

Once it has finished it will ask you to select your USB drive. The USB drive will need to be formatted as a FAT32 volume to function and spacewise mine is sitting at 1.67gb at present with all the Antivirus software, NimbleX and Slax, UBCD, Clonezilla, Parted Magic, NT Pwd, System Rescue CD and Ultimate Boot CD. I didn't try out any of the WinPE options yet.

Downloading all the necessary files was ~1.5 GB and updating the Antivirus was fast for Alvira and F-Secure however Kaspersky takes awhile due to the large number of files to download. The application does warn that its slow updating Kaspersky however.

All together a tool I'd recommend anyone add to their toolkit for its utility and ease of updating.