Farbar Recovery Scan Tool, or FRST, is a portable application designed to run on Windows 11/10, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8 in normal or safe mode to diagnose malware issues. It is also possible to run FRST in the Windows Recovery Environment in order to diagnose and fix boot issues.

It will work equally well in normal or safe mode and where a machine has boot up problems it will work efficiently in the Windows Recovery Environment. It's ability to work in the recovery environment makes it particularly useful in dealing with problems associated with machines experiencing difficulty when booting up.

If you are using Windows XP and have boot issue, the system should boot to the Recovery Environment using a PE Boot CD and then you can run FRST. This program will display detailed information about the Windows Registry loading points, services, driver services, Netsvcs entries, known DLLs, drives, and partition specifications. It will also list some important system files that could be patched by malware.