The SystemRescueCD

SystemRescueCD is a Gentoo-based live CD with graphical tools for partitioning hard disks and other maintenance and rescue tasks, which runs from a bootable CD-ROM disc (a Live CD), useful for repairing unbootable computer systems and retrieving data after a system crash. The CD is capable of graphics using the Linux framebuffer option for tools such as GParted. SystemRescueCd is a Linux distribution whose purpose is to make it easy to check and repair your system and its data after a crash or other problems arise. It is more comprehensive than Knopperdisk for this purpose as it includes many more utilities for checking and repairing your drives and their file systems.

SystemRescueCd includes 4 kernels, 2 standard ones (rescuecd and rescue 64) and 2 alternative ones (altker32 and altker64). Now, you have the possibility to compile which kernel you want, to best fit your needs. SystemRescureCD recognized touchpad and screen resolution correctly and that gave some confidence to get Gentoo working because SystemRescueCD is based on Gentoo. SystemRescue comes with my favorite data recovery tool, GNU ddrescue . This is the best utility for grabbing data off a failing hard drive. SystemRescueCd comes with all the system repair essentials. It includes low-level disk partition programs such as GParted and sfdisk and disk repair tools like TestDisk and Partimage.

System configuration can be done via a Web browser from any workstation in the network. Virtual shared printers can be configured to apply letterheads, watermarks, cover pages, and appendixes to all printed documents. System Rescue CD includes Captive, a program that mounts NTFS partitions with full read/write access, which is useful for situations where NTOSkernel.exe or other important Windows system files get corrupted. To mount NTFS partitions using this, you need to have Windows installed on your machine.

Linux is very flexible and always growing everyday. Linux is a completely free piece of software started by Linus Torvalds and supported by thousands of programmers worldwide. Of course, the thing that people want is application software: programs to help them get what they want to do done, from editing documents to running a business to playing games to writing more software.