Microsoft is gearing up to unveil the Beta development milestone of Diagnostics and Recovery Toolset (DaRT) 7 in just a few months. With DaRT 7 Beta planned for release in April, early adopters interested in test driving the Build can already sign up via Microsoft Connect.

For those not familiar with the Diagnostics and Recovery Toolset, DaRT is designed to streamline the PC recovery process. Obviously, this is a tool designed for IT professionals and not for end users.

Brad McCabe, the product manager for DaRT reveals that with version 7, the focus was placed on deployment scenarios and remote recovery.

“With DaRT 7’s remote recovery features, the help desk can have the end user boot into DaRT and enable the remote connection. The help desk person can then perform this initial diagnostic work and either repair the problem right away,” McCabe explained.

In this regard, DaRT is set up to be all about the speed of recovery. Essentially, Microsoft has aimed enabling IT pros to opt for PC recovery simply because DaRT make it faster than reimagining the machine.

With DaRT 7, the Redmond company has also moved past using a CD or DVD to boot into the recovery environment.

In this regard, a few extra options have been added, with IT pros bound to embrace them.

“In DaRT 7 we fully support loading DaRT to a USB drive or key. Similar to the CD/DVD process, this requires you to physically install the USB in the machine and boot from it,” McCabe added.

“Another option that we support in DaRT 7 is PXE, or network boot, of the DaRT image. This allows the IT group to put the DaRT images on a network server and have users press F11 (or the correct key in their organization) to boot from the DaRT image on the network server instead of their local hard drive.”

Yet another option for IT professionals is to make DaRT available alongside WinRE. DaRT 7 will support scenarios in which it will be provisioned right on the user’s HDD, waiting to come in handy, and available by pressing F8 during reboot.