System Rescue CD

There is a free Linux live CD that is a must-have tool for the Windows user as well. It’s a boot disk that loads a Linux operating system and provides tools for diagnosing, maintaining, manipulating and repairing your file systems and network connections. As a live CD, it doesn’t matter what operating system is installed on your computer, and which file system is being used on the hard drive. That’s because it runs directly from the CD drive without using the installed operating system at all. For any computer user with an intermediate level of knowledge, this disk can be system CPR.

If you’ve ever had a major computer system failure, and not known where to turn, SystemRescueCD can make the difference between throwing your computer in the recycle can, and getting your computer running properly again. It can help you to retrieve data from a corrupted file system, or damaged hard drive. You can take a look at the drive contents directly, and manipulate a large variety of file systems. I have used it to clean-erase a hard drive (not just reformat), and move, resize, create and delete single and multiple file system partitions. I have also used it to trouble shoot and correct network connections. The authors describe it this way:

Description: SystemRescueCd is a Linux system on a bootable CD-ROM for repairing your system and recovering your data after a crash. It aims to provide an easy way to carry out admin tasks on your computer, such as creating and editing the partitions of the hard disk. It contains a lot of system utilities (parted, partimage, fstools, …) and basic tools (editors, midnight commander, network tools). It is very easy to use: just boot the CDROM. The kernel supports most of the important file systems (ext2/ext3, reiserfs, reiser4, xfs, jfs, vfat, ntfs, iso9660), as well as network filesystems (samba and nfs).

This is a must-have, and it’s free.

System Rescue CD at Distrowatch

System Rescue CD home page