Live USB stick for emergencies

That's totally fine.
For example, for my ASUS motherboard it will show me the bootable stick twice with one option having the addition "UEFI: " at the front. If I wanted I could also disable this so it only shows either of the options.

As @maciozo already said stick with the UEFI option and use a GPT partition table for all of your drives when installing. It's basically the successor of the legacy Master Boot Record (MBR) and is meant for (but not limited to) 64-bit systems and HDD sizes of 4TB and greater.

Is hiren's getting a bit old? Do the tools still work for modern operating systems like Windows 10? Seems its last update was in 2012.

I know that this isn't useful for your purposes, but it might give you ideas for the future.

I own one of these:

They can do HDD speeds on USB 3.0 (up to 125 MB/s) with only getting warm.

I have this software installed on that USB:

http://www.easy2boot.com

This software allows me to dynamically boot, using a GUI from any ISO I have on that drive, while also still allowing me to use all the extra space for normal files. There are some caveats to it, but mostly it works great.

This is what I currently have on that drive:

  • Multiple Windows 10, Windows Server 2008 R2, and Windows 8.1 ISOs.
  • Multiple Linux ISOs including Fedora 25 Workstation, Arch, Antegeros, Mint, and LXLE (see here).
  • AOMEI Backupper's Linux ISO for backing up files, Clonezilla's ISO, and Avast's boot time scanner.
  • Memtest86+

And I can boot any of them by selecting an option in a menu it auto-generates by booting to the USB.

The caveats mostly have to do with UEFI. If you boot via UEFI and are using a UEFI compatible image (ISOs aren't, you have to convert them to an .imgPTN file type), the menu won't show up, so the only way to get back to it is to boot via BIOS/CSM, or by putting the USB into a computer and running the .exe on it that reconfigures the menu and deselects an image to boot from.

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I think it's been updated since 2012...I think. I really don't use it much anymore though so you may very well be right. Still a great tool though, even if it is dated, since the tools on there would still work for most testing purposes.

System Rescue CD Boots to a Gentoo-based Linux using XFCE GUI. Heavy emphasis on hard disk repair, file recovery or pulling images off of failing drives.

I used YUMI have hiren boot cd, ultimate boot cd and various other tools and Linux distros on a 16gb stick

I used a tool once to recover deleted files from an NTFS drive. That's be a gooder. Don't remember what it was.

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