The ultimate PC repair kit: SystemRescueCD 1.40

Like everyone who makes his living from computers, I'm always getting called on by friends and family to help them fix their PC problems. Thanks to the Gentoo Linux-based SystemRescueCD, I'm usually able to fix most of their troubles without breaking a sweat.

SystemRescueCD, like the name suggests, is a system rescue disk. You can use it as a bootable CD-ROM, USB stick, or even over a network connection. While you can use it as a desktop in own right, its real job is repairing crashed systems. In particular, with its disk and file system repair tools, it's great for bring dead hard drives back to life.

With Linux disk and file tools like parted, partimage, fstools and many others, and support for almost all Linux, Unix and Windows file systems, such as ext2/ext3/ext4, FAT, JFS, NTFS, ReiserFS, Reiser4, and XFS, I have yet to find a hard drive that could still spin that I couldn't at least pull data from with SystemRescueCD.

In particular, I've found FSArchiver (Filesystem Archiver for Linux) to be very handy for moving data from a nearly dead disk to a new drive. With FSArchiver, I'm able to clone file systems from one device to another, even if the partition I'm moving it to is smaller than the original or if it uses an entirely different file system. It works by saving file-system to a compressed archive file and then safely restoring it to a new device. It's a really handy trick and I've often used it to save files to USB drives.

This Linux distribution also comes with many other handy programs such as Midnight Commander, one of my favorite file managers, and a variety of editors and network tools. For an interface, you can use either a shell-based console or the lightweight Xfce graphical desktop.

I've always that, thanks to this distribution's support for PXE network booting, I could boot a troubled PC over the LAN into the distribution. This is great for network administrators with multiple PCs scattered across a campus.

In the latest version (1.40) of SystemRescueCD, you can also use NFS (Network File System) or NBD (network block device) to boot troubled systems remotely. This method has the advantage of using even less memory on the problem-plagued PC to boot. While it's not likely that you still need to work on PCs with only 256MB of RAM, I have been able to boot up PCs with serious memory problems using these network boot techniques.

In addition — and I can't stress this point enough — SystemRescueCD comes with excellent documentation. Even if you barely know how to use Linux, if you follow the instructions, you'll be able to run this distribution and fix many common PC problems.

How good is this distribution? I always keep a copy with me in my laptop bag. After all, you never know when you're going to find a friend with a fried computer. Check it out. You'll be glad you did.