25
votes

What's your system recovery CD? I've used Ultimate Boot CD and GParted. What works for you?

9 Answers 9

13
votes

Trinity Rescue Kit (version 3.4)

It is possible to boot TRK in three different ways:

  • as a bootable CD which you can burn yourself from a downloadable isofile or a self burning Windows executable
  • from a USB stick/disk (optionally also a fixed disk), installable from Windows or from the bootable TRK cd (which is easier and safer)
  • from network over PXE: you start 1 TRK from CD or USB and you run all other computers from that one over the network without modifying anything to you local network

Here 's a sumup of some of the most important features, new and old:

  • easily reset windows passwords with the improved winpass tool
  • simple and easy menu interface
  • 5 different virusscan products integrated in a single uniform commandline with online update capability
  • full ntfs write support thanks to ntfs-3g
  • winclean, a utility that cleans up all sorts of unnecessary temporary files on your computer
  • clone computers over the network via multicast
  • wide range of hardware support (kernel 2.6.35)
  • contributed backup utility called "pi", to automate local machine backups
  • easy script to find and mount all local filesystems
  • self update capability to include and update all virusscanners + local changes you made to TRK
  • full proxyserver support
  • run a samba fileserver (windows like filesharing)
  • run a ssh server
  • recovery and undeletion of files with utilities and procedures
  • recovery of lost partitions
  • evacuation of dying disks
  • full read/write and rpm support
  • UTF-8 international character support (select keyboard language from the scrollable textmenu at startup)
  • 2 rootkit detection uitilities
  • most software updated to recent versions
  • literally thousands of changes and bugfixes since version 3.3
  • elaborated documentation, including manpages for all commands (also TRK 's own)
2
  • Add a space after - Apr 30, 2009 at 16:41
  • Try stars so markdown will create an unordered list of it ^^ May 23, 2009 at 12:41
7
votes

grml as in grml.org! :) It's designed as a Live System for system administrators. It provides:

  • 2500 software packages

  • 3 different flavours (grml, grml-medium, grml-small), all of them available as:
  • 32bit and 64bit version
  • LVM and software RAID support out of the box (including bootoptions for autoenabling them)
  • support for booting via PXE/USB/...
  • ssh-server through bootoption 'ssh=password'
  • support for remote acces via iSCSI
  • support for all the relevant filesystems (ext3/ext4, xfs, ntfs,...)
  • tools and bootoptions for forensical and data rescue investigations
  • default boot into console (X.org available through grml-x) providing a full featured GNU screen, htop, multitail,... setup
  • a great Zsh default configuration

Disclaimer: yes, I'm related to grml. :)

2
votes

Besides Trinity, I also like Backtrack

2
votes

Hiren's boot CD works for recovery but it really shines when you need to repartion or format drives, check hardware errors and fix file systems.

1
vote

I've used http://www.ubcd4win.com/ before, not for a while though

1
vote

Ultimate Boot CD too. Found an hard drive error with it, although those apps are not the most intuitive thing on earth.

1
vote

System Rescue CD (sysrescd) due to inertia - did some customization, prepared some scripts.

0
votes

I've always used knoppix, mostly due to inertia. But recently have had the need to run a decent virus scanner on non functional machines - I used the tools kaspersky provide to make Bart Pe boot disks and have found them very useful.

0
votes

ERD Emergency Rescue Disk...lets you boot into a windows-like environment, edit the registry, copy/delete files, browse the drives, etc.

I have also used Hirems and Backtrack, but I really like ERD.

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