“We’ve all had this nightmare. You turn on your functioning Windows/Linux PC, and all you get is a blank screen, or a message telling you that certain files are missing, or the kernel has panicked for some obscure reason. Nothing works, and you need the data on your machine.” A Linux rescue-cd is the solution.
However, In my experience, you may not be able to use QtParted to resize an NTFS partition if its corrupted for some reason. I have to run a chkdsk.exe inside Windows XP first before running it. This is with Knoppix version 3.8.
Thats true, but I wonder if you can use BartsPE to run chkdisk…
RIP: Rescue Is Possible. Slack-based, small and efficient bootable cd-rom with many tools.
rescue –> recovery
http://www.tux.org/pub/people/kent-robotti/looplinux/rip/
ntfs sucks…
usually a good fdisk /mbr will clean up the freakout with ntfs and using other tools to resize it…USUALLY!
“However, In my experience, you may not be able to use QtParted to resize an NTFS partition ”
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Try systemrescuecd . It’s qtparted which is able to do so .
A live CD in general is a handy tool.Good for example to clone your windows to another (removable) disk with ntfsclone.Or for snanning for virusses and or spyware,repairing /boot/grub/menu.list.
I keep a Live CD of my system, in this way I can boot my system recover the data, even if the problem is hardware related.
I love this one. I use it whenever I need to backup filesystems over the network (netcat is a lovely thing). It takes a while to boot, but once it does you are almost guaranteed that your hardware is going to work.
Knoppix has saved my butt many a time. Its so handy, I just keep a disc with me at all times (one at work, one at home, and one in the car, just in case).
Debian’s installer will have rescue support again, post sarge: http://kitenet.net/~joey/blog/entry/d-i_after_sarge-2005-06-28-00-2…
I had a 120 gig HDD that got screwed by a power outage while loading a Linux distro. It had FAT32, NTFS, EXT3, and BFS. I tried to save the mbr & part info with
Testdisk -on a DOS floppy it would pick out the part boundaries but wasn’t able to sucessfully write them or a new mbr
Testdisk run on Knoppix was the same way
a ‘Recovery is Possible’ CD -it could find the parts but not boot to any with ‘Smart Boot Manager’
GPart and QTParted could only get “read errors”
Also tried a couple of other ‘good’ utilities I have around with no luck
I’m not sure why, but I stuck in a BeOS install CD, PhOS to be exact, since it has the NTFS-read only on it. When I killed the ‘Installer’, and ran it as a LiveCD I was able to mount all my partitions and by accessing the Reiser FS plug-in and a couple of other things I had on the HDD, I was able to back everything up with Helios, clear off the drive, and reformat it so I could set it up as new.
Sysreccd works very well, above my expectations. It also has a easy usermanual and can be customized alot, i.e. also trimmed down in size and re-burned. Autorun scripts at boot is also a nice thing to be able to cutomize.
yea, i have wrote sarge off as being a “kludge”, something that had to happen, that isnt the best that could be done, but that had to be done to move one, something that occured while we was formulating a plan that would allow a good release to occur and to be kept up with…
dont know how many times i have saved myself with disk1 or floppy1 of woody….
sarge – the “it gets worst before it gets better” release…
I would have liked to get a review on Recovery Is Possible (RIP)CD. Pretty sure there are more linux based recovery cd’s that could be added on a head to head text. Might be a good OSnews worthy article.
For necessarily windows specific recovery tasks there is the ubcd4win[1] which provides a BartPE environment with tons of really cool tools. If recovering windows pc’s is something you find yourself doing, then this, or your own custom bartpe build, is a must have. I’ve found that significant amount’s of data rescue seems to be more easily achieved under a linux or dos environment rather than windows :/ But don’t let that get you down, there are a ton of other tools provided on the ubcd4win that more than make up it.
Largely missed on most ‘rescue’ cd’s, the UBCD[2] offers the diagnostic utilities of most manufacturer’s of x86 hardware. Also included is INSERT, a dsl/knoppix derived distro which, suffice it say, offers pretty much all the tools provided in the review all on one shiny disk!
1. http://www.ubcd4win.com/
2. http://ubcd.sourceforge.net/