SystemRescueCd a Gentoo-based live CD containing a collection of data rescue and hard disk management utilities

SystemRescueCd is a Linux system on a bootable CD-ROM for repairing your system and your data after a crash.

It also 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 contains many of system utilities (parted, partimage, fstools, ...) and basic ones (editors, Midnight Commander, network tools).

It aims to be very easy to use: just boot from the CD-ROM, and you can do everything. The kernel of the system supports most important file systems (ext2/ext3, ReiserFS, XFS, JFS, VFAT, NTFS, ISO9660), and network ones (Samba and NFS). SystemRescueCd is based on the Gentoo Live CD.

Updates:

François Dupoux has released a new version of SystemRescueCd, a Gentoo-based live CD containing a variety of utilities for disk management and data rescue tasks. One of the major items in this version is the brand-new Linux kernel 3.0. From the changelog: "Updated alternative kernels to Linux 3.0 (altker32 + altker64); ipdated firmware in both the initramfs and in the main file system; added support for Linux 3.0 in genkernel; Linux kernel modules are gzipped in the embedded initramfs to save memory; fixed busy CPU in the terminal by downgrading VTE to 0.26.3; updated Parted to 2.4 and GParted to 0.9.0; updated Portage to 2.1.10; updated TestDisk to 6.12; updated Firefox to version 5."

Download the live CD image from here: systemrescuecd-x86-2.3.0.iso (347MB, SHA256).

Recent versions:

• 2011-07-30: Distribution Release: SystemRescueCd 2.3.0
• 2011-06-05: Distribution Release: SystemRescueCd 2.2.0
• 2011-04-07: Distribution Release: SystemRescueCd 2.1.0
• 2011-02-16: Distribution Release: SystemRescueCd 2.0.1
• 2011-01-02: Distribution Release: SystemRescueCd 2.0.0
• 2010-09-12: Distribution Release: SystemRescueCd 1.6.0

Features

SystemRescueCD has several features, some of them include:

1. GNU Parted and GParted to partition disks and re-size partitions, including FAT32 and NTFS
2. Ranish Partition Manager
3. fdisk to edit the disk partition table
4. PartImage, disk imaging software which copies only used sectors
5. TestDisk to recover lost partition and PhotoRec to recover lost data
6. A CD and DVD burner
7. Two bootloaders
8. Web browsers: Mozilla Firefox, Lynx, Links, Dillo
9. Midnight Commander
10. Archiving and unarchiving abilities
11. File system tools: file system create, delete, resize, move
12. Support for many file systems, including full NTFS read/write access (via NTFS-3G) as well as FAT32 and Mac OS HFS
13. Support for Intel x86 and PowerPC systems, including Macs
14. Ability to create boot disk for operating systems
15. Support for Windows registry editing and password changing from Linux
16. Can boot FreeDOS, memory testing, hardware diagnostics and other boot disks from a single CD.

Burning DVDs and system backup

The CD can also boot from a customized DVD which has almost 4.6 GB of free space for backed-up files. This makes it good for storing all the information that is needed from a hard drive and then formatting it. To burn the DVD, one has to burn the image file first and then add all the separate files as well as folders. This should not affect the general way in which the DVD works. Then the DVD can be used to insert those files into the hard drive using Midnight Commande.