Emergency Boot Kit Free Updates

If you are a registered user of Emergency Boot Kit, then you can get free lifetime updates. Just redownload zipped EXE file from order result URL e-mailed to you shortly after the order.

If you have ordered this product when it was called Emergency Boot CD (EBCD), then you can upgrade to Emergency Boot Kit for free using EBCD to EmBootKit Update Wizard.

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Changelog

Aug, 05 of 2023 Minor update 1.6r released.

  • Emergency Boot Kit has been rebased to FreeBSD 13.2 kernel (this fixes boot problems on the new AMD CPUs and enables support for new USB host controllers).
  • Registry Defragmenter now works normally with registry hives which have root flag missing in the flags of hive entry cell (which happens sometimes on Windows 11).
  • Partition detection problem on Virtio-SCSI devices have been fixed.

Mar, 21 of 2023 Minor update 1.6q released.

  • Starting from this version, Emergency Boot Kit can boot on UEFI-based computers where video memory (UEFI GOP framebuffer) is mapped above 4 Gb boundary.
  • Also loader for CSM/BIOS-based computers was fixed to prevent division by zero on some computers where firmware pretends that disk sectors have zero size.
  • Also, starting from this version, EmBootKit Deployment Tool by default creates GPT layout on the target USB thumbdrive (previous versions created MBR layout).

Nov, 25 of 2021 Minor update 1.6p released.

  • Added support for Windows 11.
  • Added support for USB human interface devices which transmit absolute coordinates instead of relative movements (touch screens with USB input interface, virtual mice in virtual machines, various BMCs like PiKVM etc).

Aug, 05 of 2021 Minor update 1.6n released.

Added support for giveaway/promo license keys.


Jan, 19 of 2021 Minor update 1.6m released.

Updated UEFI shim loader to improve compatibility with firmware of modern laptops and motherboards.


Sep, 01 of 2020 Minor update 1.6k released.

  • Starting from this version, Mount and Boot Center supports restoring bootability of Insider Preview builds of Windows 10 in the UEFI mode with Secure Boot option enabled.
  • Registry validation rules for Registry Editor and Registry Defragmenter were relaxed, starting from this version the following condition no longer results in a fatal error:
    KS-Cell #0x... has non-matching actual and stored reference count

May, 28 of 2020 Minor update 1.6j released.

Fixed "Read-only file system" error which sometimes occurred for the users of paid edition of Emergency Boot Kit (NTFS filesystem of Windows system partition, latest builds of Windows 10 only, Fast Startup option enabled in Windows settings, system firmware has hibernation capability).


May, 22 of 2020 Minor update 1.6i released.

Added support for VirtIO block devices.


May, 17 of 2020 Minor update 1.6h released.

Starting from this version, EmBootKit Mount & Boot Center skips unreadable UEFI variables (no longer fails with fatal error).


Feb, 07 of 2020 Minor update 1.6g released.

Rules of Windows Registry hive validator (which is used by Registry Editor and other registry-related tools) were relaxed to allow UTF-16 characters which are inconvertible to Unicode (these ones are used by third-party software).


Jan, 22 of 2020 Minor update 1.6f released.

Fixed license key recognition bug in the Update Wizard.


Nov, 20 of 2019 Minor update 1.6e released.

Starting from this version, EmBootKit Deployer can oust competing processes which prevent exclusive write access to the target USB storage device.


Oct, 07 of 2019 Minor update 1.6d released.

The following error has been fixed in the registry-related tools (it occasionally occurred for Windows 10.1903 registry hives):

L2 validation failed: Log header does not match hive header in field Minor
(value in hive = 0x00000003,
 value in log = 0x00000005)


Aug, 29 of 2019 Minor update 1.6c released.

Fixed assertion failure 2257/TW3YB (which was related to off-screen text output).


Jul, 13 of 2019 Minor update 1.6b released.

  • Added support for eMMC storage devices.
  • Fixed kernel freeze when booting on computers without UART.

Jul, 10 of 2019 Minor update 1.6a released.

  • "Called by UEFI" option was added to EmBootKit Mount & Boot Center for EFI bootloaders. Starting from this version, EmBootKit Mount & Boot Center is aware of EFI runtime variables, verifies and updates them as necessary. User Guide for Mount & Boot Center was updated as well.
  • Improved compatibility of EmBootKit Registry Defragementer with latest builds of Windows 10 (access and layered bits are now preserved for root keys in the registry hives).

Jun, 26 of 2019 New version 1.6 released.

Improvements in the loader.


Jun, 12 of 2019 Minor update 1.5w released.

The following error was fixed (it could prevent editing registry hive or defragmenting registry):

L4 validation failed:
  KS-cell #0x... has invalid chain of UTF-16 byte pairs instead of its name
  Details: Can't convert string encoded in UTF-16: inconversible character (...) encountered at offset ...


Apr, 15 of 2019 Minor update 1.5v released.

Starting from this version, Emergency Boot Kit skips unreadable directory entries (rather than failing with fatal error).


Mar, 22 of 2019 Minor update 1.5u released.

Added support for USB human interface devices which have multiple logical devices sharing one endpoint.


Mar, 19 of 2019 Minor update 1.5t released.

Kernel was upgraded from version 11.0 to 12.0.


Feb, 03 of 2019 Minor update 1.5s released.

Starting from this version, Emergency Boot Kit supports high-DPI displays (font no longer looks small).


Jan, 24 of 2019 Minor update 1.5r released.

The following errors were fixed (they could prevent editing registry hive or defragmenting registry):

  • L4 validation failed:
      KS-cell #0x... has abnormally large length of security descriptor
  • Validation warning for ... registry hive: L4 validation WARNING:
      Index-of-subkeys cell #0x... has type IR,
      but there are not enough subkeys to be contained in IR


Dec, 03 of 2018 Minor update 1.5q released.

Registry validator: increased tolerance to the leaks of allocated cells in the registry hives. They started to appear since Windows 10.1804 and seem to be caused by recent changes in MS Windows registry implementation code. Emergency Boot Kit must be able to open and update such registry hives regardless.


Dec, 02 of 2018 Minor update 1.5p released.

Starting from this version, validation rules for Windows registry were relaxed to allow embedded NUL characters in the registry key names and in the registry value names. Apparently there is some third party software relying on these features.


Sep, 15 of 2018 Minor update 1.5n released.

  • Added support for viewing and editing new registry hive: SYSCACHE.HVE in "System Volume Information" folder.
  • Added support for viewing and editing access/layered bits for registry keys. These features were originally introduced in Windows 10 Redstone 1.
  • Improved reliability of replaying registry logs (for the latest version of their format, HvLE). This matters when editing registry hives after unscheduled shutdown of Windows 10 and Windows 8.1.
  • Fixed the following problem in registry-related tools: "Attempt to read data from non-existing cell". It could occur due to broken referential integrity in the doubly-linked list of security descriptors in the registry hive. Rather than failing outright, starting from this version Emergency Boot Kit will attempt to repair referential integrity of hive security descriptors.

Aug, 11 of 2018 Minor update 1.5m released.

A bug fixed in boot code update procedure for FAT32 partitions.


May, 14 of 2018 Minor update 1.5k released.

Added handling of specific condition when pre-existing EFI System Partition or Microsoft Reserved Partition could prevent deploying EmBootKit to fixed USB mass storage device with GPT partition layout.


May, 11 of 2018 Minor update 1.5j released.

All builtin links to prime-expert.com and subdomains were changed from http to https.


Feb, 26 of 2018 Minor update 1.5i released.

Starting from this version, Mount & Boot Center takes into account offset on disk for boot partition when verifying boot path from BIOS. If offset on disk for boot partition is wrong (usually after transfer from another disk), then Windows does not emit any error messages, just endlessly blinking cursor on black screen.


Feb, 19 of 2018 Minor update 1.5h released.

Before this version, Mount & Boot Center could not detect Windows Loader in EFI System Partition, if said EFI System Partition was just created in the Partition Manager (a reboot was required). Reboot is no longer required.


Nov, 21 of 2017 Minor update 1.5g released.

Fixed incompatibility of Registry Defragmenter with Windows 10 Fall Creators Update


Jul, 12 of 2017 Minor update 1.5f released.

Fixed NVMe detection problem (fast SSDs with NVMe interface were not detected by EmBootKit until this version, these are mostly a subset of M.2 devices)


Jun, 29 of 2017 Minor update 1.5e released.

Fixed hardware compatibility problem with Intel B250 chipsets: Emergency Boot Kit no longer hangs up before displaying main menu.


Feb, 03 of 2017 Minor update 1.5d released.

  • The following assertion failures in the Mount and Boot Center have been fixed: 1626/BK5SC (in 64-bit build) and 2859/YE5WU (in 32-bit build). They weren't independent errors, and always were fired side-by-side with other errors (e.g. unreadable disk or corrupt registry hive).
  • Both bootloaders (UEFI and BIOS/CSM) are now caching File Allocation Table in chunks of 128 Kb, instead of loading the whole table. This should improve compatibility when booting from large USB HDDs.
  • Validation rules for symlinks in the Windows Registry have been relaxed. Apparently there are third party software which creates other values besides REG_LINK in registry keys with symlink flag.
  • Block devices with unreadable first sector and zero-length block devices no longer prevent Mount and Boot Center from starting.
  • Readonly filesystems on fixed disks now yield clearer diagnostics in demo version.

Jan, 30 of 2017 Minor update 1.5c released.

Added support for new format of password database introduced in Windows 10 Redstone.


Dec, 31 of 2016 Minor update 1.5b released.

Validation of class names in Windows Registry has been relaxed, because third party software is using class names with invalid UTF-16 surrogate pairs to store its installation metadata.


Nov, 11 of 2016 Major update 1.5a released.

  • Added 64-bit version and automatic switching between 32/64-bit versions at boot time
  • Added UEFI boot capability (retaining BIOS/CSM boot capability)
  • Kernel upgrade: 10.2 to 11.0
  • New bootloader, faster load time

Oct, 21 of 2016 Product renamed and new version 1.5 released.

Emergency Boot CD has been renamed to Emergency Boot Kit. From now on, this software can be quickly and easily self-installed to USB mass storage devices. All users of Emergency Boot CD can upgrade to Emergency Boot Kit for free.


Sep, 25 of 2016 Minor update 1.4t released.

Basing on practical experience, EBCD Mount & Boot Center was updated to detect special conditions when HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM registry hive is unreadable because of bad blocks on disk (or has a corrupt structure) and to suggest restoring this hive from backup in RegBack folder (if such backup hive exists).


Sep, 22 of 2016 Minor update 1.4s released.

Starting from this version, EBCD is able to mount Windows 8/8.1/10 system partitions when these systems are configured to use hybrid boot.


Sep, 11 of 2016 Minor update 1.4r released.

Bugfix in FAT filesystem formatting code: until this version, a number of preceding sectors was calculated incorrectly in certain cases.


Sep, 05 of 2016 Minor update 1.4q released.

Starting from this version, update wizard displays permanent private URL for updates instead of generating updated ISO file. Also license keys (\boot\lic_key.txt) were updated to include permanent private URL for updates.


Aug, 08 of 2016 Minor update 1.4p released.

Starting from this version, free disk space information is displayed in file save dialogs. This is especially useful in the context of partition backup.


Jul, 18 of 2016 Minor update 1.4n released.

Size of NTFS filesystems on removable block devices under certain rare conditions was incorrectly reported as zero until this version.


Jun, 11 of 2016 Minor update 1.4m released.

This update fixes the following non-fatal error (which occurred with reference to registry keys updated before year 1990 or after year 2030):

L4 validation failed: KN-cell has problems in last write time field: Timestamp looks invalid


Feb, 21 of 2016 Minor update 1.4k released.

EBCD kernel (FreeBSD) has been updated from version 8.4 to 10.2. Hardware support has been improved, especially USB 3.0 on Skylake platform.


Sep, 10 of 2015 Minor update 1.4j released.

  • From now on, EBCD can be updated by redownloading zipped ISO file from order result URL. EBCD Update Wizard remains for early users whose order result URL does not belong to prime-expert.com domain.
  • Mount & Boot Center no longer errors out if HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices registry key does not exist.
  • Fixed bug in EBCD Update Wizard which prevented it from starting if there are no CD/DVD drives in the system.

Sep, 02 of 2015 Minor update 1.4i released.

  • PDF product manual was updated and extended
  • Fixed a few small bugs in Partition Manager and Mount & Boot Center

Aug, 21 of 2015 Minor update 1.4h released.

Fixed assertion failure 1232/PC6QC.


Jul, 27 of 2015 Minor update 1.4g released.

Improved support of Windows 10.


Jul, 15 of 2015 Minor update 1.4f released.

  • Added initial support for EFI to Mount & Boot Center.
  • Single non-mountable partition could prevent launch of Mount & Boot Center until this version.

Jul, 06 of 2015 Minor update 1.4e released.

Bugfix in FAT16/FAT32 filesystem driver (since EBCD version 1.4c, some files written to USB thumbdrives in EBCD were unreadable in Windows).


Jul, 05 of 2015 Minor update 1.4d released.

  • Added support for Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 to the Mount & Boot Center.
  • Fixed assertion failure: 212/DA9LW in 1.4c, 2174/LA5TJ in 1.4b, 2263/MD6WW in 1.4a, 220/QL5FY in 1.4

Jul, 03 of 2015 Minor update 1.4c released.

  • All registry-related tools have been updated to handle new format of binary registry logs (which appeared in Windows 8.1).
  • Platform kernel has been updated: from 8.2-RELEASE to 8.4-RELEASE-p32.

Sep, 20 of 2014 Minor update 1.4b released.

Fixed handling of single quote characters in license keys (they were not properly escaped until this version)


May, 03 of 2014 Minor update 1.4a released.

EBCD Mount & Boot Center now handles normally special case when there are so many disks or operating systems that they don't fit the screen.


Apr, 08 of 2013 New version 1.4 released.

  • New tool added: EBCD Partition Manager: FDISK-like functionality and partition imaging (wanted by 38.2% of our users according to the poll).
  • Poll has been updated to exclude already implemented features.
  • Retail price of EBCD was permanently increased by $10. All registered users of old versions can upgrade for free.

Mar, 25 of 2013 Minor update 1.3x released.

This update fixes the following error in registry-related EBCD tools:

Failed to read 'InstallDate' value of '\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion' key in the SOFTWARE registry hive

Mar, 13 of 2013 Minor update 1.3w released.

This update fixes assertion failure 2161/SZ7BZ in Mount & Boot Center.


Feb, 23 of 2013 Minor update 1.3v released.

This update fixes the following error:

Can't run Mount & Boot Center:

Can't extract boot code from vfat filesystem: boot sector is not valid

Feb, 14 of 2013 Minor update 1.3u released.

This update fixes assertion failures 2109/ET3QA, 2584/CF3NH in Mount & Boot Center (related to updating boot sector of Windows 8 boot partition).


Jan, 02 of 2013 Minor update 1.3t released.

Mount & Boot Center: fixed a bug when changed BCD hive wasn't commited to disk sometimes.


Oct, 31 of 2012 Minor update 1.3s released.

  • Added support for USB 3.0 host controllers (XHCI).
  • Newer UDF filesystems on DVD discs should work OK now.

Oct, 23 of 2012 Minor update 1.3r released.

Assertion failure 1419/YQ9UV should be fixed now. It occurred when starting Mount & Boot Center on certain hardware configurations.


Sep, 21 of 2012 Major update 1.3q released.

New feature added: Mount & Boot Center. Mount & Boot Center is a tool to reassign and fix missing drive letters (mount points), including disk C:, in Windows installations; a tool to easily edit boot menus (boot.ini of NTLDR and BCD of Bootmgr); a tool to fix boot records and active partition flags. Also Mount & Boot Center can change disk signatures and GUIDs (in sync with MountedDevices key in SYSTEM hive and device descriptors in BCD hive) and resolve conflicts of disk signatures.


Sep, 07 of 2012 Minor update 1.3p released.

Logical volumes of extended partitions with non-empty boot code in EBR are now recognized on MBR disks.


Sep, 05 of 2012 Minor update 1.3n released.

Additional log file Z:\Logs\disks_partitions.xml now contains information about disks and partitions (for EBCD debug purpose).


Aug, 04 of 2012 Minor update 1.3m released.

if_em aka em0 (driver for Intel PRO/1000 Gigabit Ethernet chip) has been disabled entirely.


Aug, 04 of 2012 Minor update 1.3k released.

Bugfixing release: EBCD should halt no more after the message "em0: Using an MSI interrupt" at boot time.


Jul, 26 of 2012 Minor update 1.3j released.

Added support for GPT disks.


Jul, 02 of 2012 Minor update 1.3i released.

Bugfix in Windows installation detector: After code maintenance in v1.3a EBCD wasn't able to detect Windows installations in \WINNT folder.


Jun, 19 of 2012 Minor update 1.3h released.

New features in the Registry Editor: search and replace.


May, 22 of 2012 Minor update 1.3g released.

  • Registry Editor now supports selection of registry keys with Ins or GrayPlus/GrayMinus, mass renaming (by wildcard) and mass deletion of selected registry keys.
  • Improvements in common load/save dialog (error handling of missing files and missing/readonly disks; support for full pathnames in saved file name field).
  • Registry difference report now contains correct file name for right column; report name in Z:\Logs is substituted automatically.
  • Password editor now strictly prevalidates and postvalidates SAM registry hive.

May, 20 of 2012 Minor update 1.3f released.

New features in the Registry Editor: key export, import and comparison to external file.


May, 11 of 2012 Minor update 1.3e released.

Small bugfix in error handling and reporting code of Registry Editor.


May, 10 of 2012 Major update 1.3d released.

New feature added: Registry Editor.


May, 01 of 2012 Minor update 1.3c released.

Update wizard should work OK now for 1.2d and earlier versions updated directly from CD.


Mar, 20 of 2012 Minor update 1.3b released.

Bugfixing release: Update wizard should work OK now for EBCD 1.1k and earlier full versions ordered in 2008-2010.


Mar, 03 of 2012 Minor update 1.3a released.

  • Bugfix in Password Wizard: SAM hives without corresponding LOG file could not be saved (there was file rename error).
  • Small UI improvements.

Mar, 01 of 2012 New version 1.3 released.

New feature added: Windows Registry Defragmenter.


Feb, 28 of 2012 Minor update 1.2r released.

Fixed a bug in Registry access library: keys with lowercase Unicode characters in range U+0080..U+00FF within first four characters of key name were unreachable when stored in fast hashless index; this caused "Can't get key class ... key does not exist" error message when starting Windows Password Wizard (SAM hive didn't pass prevalidation test).


Feb, 18 of 2012 Minor update 1.2q released.

Two bugs in the Registry access library were fixed:

  • Wrong size of chunks was chosen on creation/update of large BLOB values.
  • Update of the first sector in the first bin conflicted with update of the timestamp in the first bin.

Feb, 02 of 2012 Minor update 1.2p released.

Registry access library now correctly updates statistics in registry key nodes (i.e. max length of value name, max length of value data).


Jan, 28 of 2012 Minor update 1.2n released.

Fixed assertion failures in viewer when scrolling empty file.


Jan, 16 of 2012 Bugfixing update 1.2m released.

  • Multiple assertion failures in editor were fixed (related to tabulation handing).
  • New viewer now supports arbitrarily large files. Old viewer used to exhaust free memory on large files and reboot EBCD because of SIGKILL delivered to the main process.
  • Version number 1.2l was skipped to avoid confusion with 1.21.

Dec, 27 of 2011 Minor update 1.2k released.

Halting problem after "em0: Using an MSI Interrupt" was fixed.


Dec, 16 of 2011 Minor update 1.2j released.

Internal rearrangements and enhancements, no user-visible changes.


Nov, 10 of 2011 Minor update 1.2i released.

Fixed-size ramdisk replaced with growing tmpfs. Errors related to out-of-ramdisk-space condition like 

Master registry file requires rollback, but the log file is either corrupt,

or doesn't apply to master file.
or 
Can't run windows password wizard

Failed to read '\SAM' key of SAM database
(especially on old Windows installations with large registry files) should be fixed now.


Nov, 05 of 2011 Minor update 1.2h released.

Fixed the error which could occur when switching to 800x600 screen mode: 

failed to map video memory: invalid argument


Oct, 21 of 2011 Important update 1.2g released.

Fixed BSD loader to skip ISA memory hole at 15-16 Mb when loading ramdisk.
Also disabled compression of the kernel and ramdisk and added diagnostic message to EBCD init.
This should fix the halting problem after the following message: 

Mounting root from ufs:/dev/md0

Also EBCD ISO and Update Wizard are now ZIP-compressed to aid against partial download errors.


Oct, 03 of 2011 Minor update 1.2f released.

Fixed a minor bug/misprint.


Oct, 01 of 2011 Important update 1.2e released.

EBCD has moved to the new kernel (BSD).


Jul, 01 of 2011 Minor update 1.2d released.

This version should fix the following bug:


Can't add device Z:\System\block\sdd

Out of range access detected


Object: ECBasicString

File: Src/linux-commander/rtl/strconv/ECStringConversion.cpp

Line: 670


Jun, 30 of 2011 Minor update 1.2c released.

Bugfixing (USB related).


Jun, 30 of 2011 Minor update 1.2b released.

USB support, which was broken in 1.2 and 1.2a, now works as expected.


Jun, 07 of 2011 Minor update 1.2a released.

Now EBCD can automatically detect VESA video modes supported by video card and monitor. This should ultimately fix trashed screen problems after bootup. Default choice of video mode still can be overriden by user, but now all video modes unsupported by BIOS are hidden from the menu.


May, 17 of 2011 New version 1.2 released.

All system components (kernel, libc, cross-compiler, ntfs driver, GUI library) were updated to the latest versions. This is a starting point for new features, which will be added in subsequent updates, when stability of the new environment is confirmed.


Feb, 16 of 2009 Minor update 1.1k released.

Fixed a bug in Password Wizard which produced "out of range access" error in Level 2 Registry component in some rare cases when growth of registry file was required to complete password change operation.


Jan, 20 of 2009 Minor update 1.1j released.

Fixed a bug in Password Wizard which forced skipping of local disks with Windows installations if SOFTWARE registry hive was stored without a log.


Jan, 01 of 2009 Minor update 1.1i released.

Added detailed descriptions why local disks are skipped in Password Wizard. Users who get "There are no Microsoft Windows installations on this PC" error in Password Wizard are encouraged to send detailed bug reports.


Dec, 09 of 2008 Minor update 1.1h released.

Order ID added to activation key. Activation keys for 1.1h+ versions will not be applicable to older versions; activation keys for older version will be applicable to 1.1h+ versions.


Oct, 05 of 2008 Minor update 1.1g released.

  • String implementation changed to more reliable to fix possible race condition
  • Improved assertion handling to avoid dependency on string class
  • Added disclaimer message for Password Wizard
  • Fixed too large font appearance under Vista with nondefault DPI, on the website also

Aug, 05 of 2008 Minor update 1.1f released.

  • Fixed assertion error in ECNtUser.cpp (password wizard, XP SP3 and Vista)
  • Added more video modes (for users of some laptops)

Jul, 31 of 2008 Minor update 1.1e released.

More verbose diagnostics for unknown hash format errors


Jul, 30 of 2008 Minor update 1.1d released.

  • Added HTML help to CD image
  • Fixed out-of-range access error in registry library which occurred when reading empty value of type REG_MULTI_SZ

Jul, 29 of 2008 Minor update 1.1c released.

  • 1.1c: Minor bugfix in server side EBCD ISO generator of registered versions
  • 1.1b: Registration data for EBCD now can include Unicode characters
  • 1.1a: More verbose diagnostics for out-of-range exception errors

Jul, 20 of 2008 Minor update 1.1 released.

New function added: Windows Password Wizard.


May, 28 of 2008 Initial version 1.0 released.