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[geep]

Hi,

I used Puppy Linux http://puppylinux.org for the first time last week to rescue all the (not backed up!) photos, music and homework from my sister's family PC which was (trying) to run Vista..
Puppy Linux is fantastic for this.

The PC had got itself into a state where it was impossible to login. Round and round in a loop of error messages. Restore points weren't helpful.

Booting Puppy Linux off a DVD, plus a couple of USB sticks, enabled me to get all the files off onto another PC and burned to DVD. Restoring Vista from Dell's restore partition worked fine. Had already burned Vista SP1, SP2 and IE8 to DVD, so they installed without problem. A bit of tweaking and jobs a good'un.
The only little wrinkle - somehow I lost all the original datestamps on the files.

I was really impressed by Puppy. It even detected the Netgear wireless dongle OK, and got Internet connection pretty painlessly. It has a neat facility where you can save session settings - like WPA key, screen configuration, keyboard layout,  bookmarks etc - onto a USB stick to save re-entering at the next session.

Cheers,
Peter

[roseway]

I haven't used Puppy myself, but it certainly has an enthusiastic (some would say fanatical ) following. Of course, any live Linux CD would in principle be able to do the same job, but Puppy is very nice and slim.

I think the loss of the date stamps is probably down to the way the files were copied. If you used the cp command you could add the parameter -p timestamps to ensure that they were preserved, but saving attributes can always be a bit hit and miss when copying files between different filesystems with different attribute capabilities.

[BritBrat]

I have used this type of disc before but not this one and I was thinking about seeing what was around now so a very timely post.

Thanks.

Anyone have any others?

[roseway]

PCLinuxOS comes as a live CD, and has very good hardware detection, so it might be a candidate for this sort of job.

[orainsear]

There's absolutely loads of distros available now.

If you are specifically looking for a rescue tool kit then have a look at http://distrowatch.com/search.php?category=Rescue&origin=All&basedon=All&desktop=All&architecture=All&status=Active.

I have used SystemRescueCd in the past and have just noticed Ubuntu Rescue Remix which looks quite interesting.

If you play about with the filter options on that page you can find all sorts of Live CDs/distros etc.