Favorite system recovery Live CD?

Question

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

Answer 1

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)

Answer 2

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. :)

Answer 3

Besides Trinity, I also like Backtrack

Answer 4

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.

Answer 5

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

Answer 6

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

Answer 7

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

Answer 8

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.

Answer 9

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.