System Rescue Cd and Parted Magic latest releases

[Abarbarian]

http://distrowatch.com/?newsid=06003 (System Rescue Cd)

http://distrowatch.com/?newsid=06005 (Parted Magic)

Both of theses free live distros offer sets of tools that would cost you quite a lot of money if you bought the commercial equivalent. Some programs are easy to use for the standard windows user and some are , hmm, just a little tricky but usable if you are willing to do a little reading.
I have used both and found them very useful when my windows os needed rescuing from crash landing.
The System Rescue Cd is 257 MB and Parted Magic is just 78 MB so you could fit both of them on a small usb stick.


"Description: SystemRescueCd is a Linux system rescue disk available as a bootable CD-ROM or USB stick for administrating or repairing your system and 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 comes with a lot of linux software such as system tools (parted, partimage, fstools, ...) and basic tools (editors, midnight commander, network tools). It requires no installation since you just have to boot on the CD-ROM. It can be used to perform admin tasks on both linux servers, linux desktops or windows boxes. The kernel supports most of the important file systems (ext2/ext3/ext4, reiserfs, reiser4, btrfs, xfs, jfs, vfat, ntfs, iso9660), as well as network filesystems (samba and nfs). "

"SystemRescueCd is available for blind people. Now, the linux speakup screen reader is working well, and the speakup keymap is installed. This feature was tested by Gregory Nowak. Please note that you need SystemRescueCd-1.1.0 or later. Notes specific to using speakup in SystemRescueCD are available on the speakup info page.

It is possible to make customized versions of the CD. For example, you can add your own scripts, to make an automatic restoration of the system. It's also possible to burn a customized DVD, with SystemRescueCd and 4.2 GB for your data (backup for example). Read the manual for more details. There is a new manual chapter that explains How you can burn a DVD+RW from SystemRescueCd

You can use SystemRescueCd to backup data from an unbootable Windows computer, if you want to backup the data stored on a Windows computer that cannot boot any more.

It is very easy to install SystemRescueCd on an USB stick. That's very useful in case you can't boot from the CD drive. You just have to copy several files to the stick and run syslinux. The install process can be done from Linux or Windows. Follow instructions from the Manual for more details."

Here are a few of the useful tools from Parted Magic the complete list is too long to reproduce here,



ms-sys
used to create Microsoft compatible boot records

LXMusic
minimalist music player for LXDE

chntpw
utility to (re)set passwords of local accounts on Windows systems

myrescue
rescue still-readable data from a damaged harddisk
partclone
a project similar to the well-known backup utility
PhotoRec
digital photo recovery
Scrounge NTFS
data recovery program for NTFS

http://partedmagic.com/programs.html

http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page

Download pages,

http://partedmagic.com/download.html

http://linuxtracker.org/index.php?page=torrents&category=462 (Parted Magic torrents)

http://www.sysresccd.org/Download

Hope the information is useful to someone.

Enjoy.