Often you need to boot from CD to repair your system.  The easiest way to do this is to use a pre-packaged CD that will allow you to perform routine maintenance tasks as well as full system restores and imaging.  System RescueCD is the answer!

The latest version of SystemRescueCd, version 0.4, was released last week with several new features for repairing systems and recovering data after a crash.

It is a Linux system that is bootable from CD and is packed with loads of powerful tools that enable you to do everything from create and edit the partitions of the hard disk, re-image a computer, create an image, boot from a USB stick and boot discs can be customized through the addition of scripts to automate functions.

It contains a wide variety of system utilities, such as parted, partimage and fstools, and other basic tools for tasks such as editing and working on networks. For a list of system tools go here, for a detailed list of all the packages, go here.

The kernel supports most of the major file systems (ext2/ext3, reiserfs, reiser4, xfs, jfs, vfat, ntfs, iso9660), as well as network file systems (samba and nfs).

Major new features include:

• PXE Network booting
• Support for amd64/em64t architecture (x86-64bits processors)
• Support the the Sparc architecture (Sun architecture)

System tools:

• GParted is a partition clone tool for Linux.
• GNU Parted is text tool for editing disk partitions under linux
• Partimage is a Ghost/Drive-image clone for Linux
• A variety of file systems tools to format, resize, and debug an existing partition of the hard disk (e2fsprogs, reiserfsprogs, reiser4progs, xfsprogs, jfsutils, ntfsprogs, dosfstools).
• Ntfs-3g: allows you to mount your Windows partition and get a full read/write unlimited access to the NTFS partition.
• Sfdisk allows you to backup and restore your partition table
• Test-disk tool to check and undelete partition, supports reiserfs, ntfs, fat32, ext2/3 and many others Network tools (Samba, NFS, ping, nslookup, …)

Once you have created the CD, just place it in the drive and boot from it.  Once the following screen appears just hit Enter to boot, or you can hit one of the Function keys for more detailed options.

Most of your devices have native support on the CD, so most should be detected automatically.

Once all the drivers have been loaded, you will see the following screen.  Here you can enable NTFS support, start a text editor, start a web browser, start the imaging tool to create or restore an image.

Here is a shot of one of the text editors.

Here is a shot of Partition Image v. 0.6.6.

Tags | Disaster Recovery, General, Linux, Microsoft, Ubuntu, Windows Vista, Windows XP