Paragon Software is known to make backup and restore products for home and business users, as well as software designed to partition and alter hard drives. When you buy a copy of Paragon software, you have traditionally always been able to create a recovery disc that uses the WinPE environment, or Windows Preinstallation Environment, to boot from disc and perform tasks like:
Backup
Recovery
Disk cleanup
Disk partitioning
Restore to dissimilar hardware
etc.
The images for these discs can be downloaded, a long with the Windows version of the software, right from your account on Paragon's website. You could even build your own custom WinPE recovery disc, depending on what products you had purchased from the company.
However, something has changed. According to Paragon, in an e-mail sent to me very recently:
It doesn't look like any other CD-ROM or DVD-based utility programs, that make use of WinPE, have been affected. BartPE, Reatogo, and Ulltimate Boot CD (UBCD) have made no mention of a change. It is noticeable, though, that these, mostly free utility discs, use an older version of WinPE than Paragon and other commercial products. They have not posted any notes to their visitors, or made any changes o their software.
Paragon also offers an Online WinPE Builder Service if you own one or more Paragon products. This lets you create the rescue media on-the-fly in the Windows Preinstallation Recovery environment using an online utility for customers. They currently use Microsoft WinPE v3.0 for this backup, recovery, and utility media.
A Paragon representative, named Pavel Astafurov, recently addressed the issue stating:
And, it just so happens, that for at least a few more hours, you can buy Paragon Drive Copy 11 Professional for 50% for the next 3 hours (not an endorsement).
Paragon Drive Copy 11 Professional PC Software with a 50% off Discount Coupon Code - Migrate Hardware/Software From Any Source