Since the dawn of the IT department there has always been 1 disk to rule them all. A single rescue disk to save ailed hard drives, or, if all else fails, grab the last remnants of your frantic employee’s 400 page handbook on cold fusion.
Of course the reign began with bootable floppies, then bootable CD-ROMs, and now the ever-so-versatile bootable USB drive. Since the media technology has become more advanced so have the distributions. While you can install Linux on portable USB drives, I still prefer a good, old-fashioned, unborkable CD-ROM based rescue distribution. Enter SystemRescueCd, a simple, yet full-featured bootable CD-ROM that offers up the latest and greatest in workstation repair tools (taken straight from the website):
- GNU Parted
- GParted
- Partimage
- File systems tools
- NTFS-3G
- sfdisk
- Test-disk
- Network tools
For a long time I’ve felt that Linux-based rescue CDs were great for Linux workstations, and they even worked great if you needed to repair a FAT32 partition or mount NTFS as read-only (because read/write support was still experimental).
Since the completion of NTFS-3G, however, there is nothing to keep a Windows administrator tied down to commercial software.
This particular distribution does a great job reminding me of that. Using Partimage I was able to backup a partition to another hard drive. With Test-disk I was able to undelete FAT32 partitions I mistakenly borked, and I was able to resize my NTFS partition with GParted without the disclaimer stating that my drive could become unusable.
Accompanying all that is the ability to use SystemRescueCd remotely with the built-in VNC Server, backstore to keep your changes when you reboot the SystemRescueCd, and rsync for backing up laptop post-trauma data.
If you have ever found yourself in need of a very useful toolbox as an administrator, consider trying out SystemRescueCd. It offers the greatest in Open Source software that is very comparable to the available commercial counterparts, for a very nice price. Check it out, and let us know what you think!
