Cheap Linux DVD

Description: SystemRescueCd is a Linux system rescue disk available as a bootable CD-ROM or USB stick for administrating or repairing your system and data after a crash. It aims to provide an easy way to carry out admin tasks on your computer, such as creating and editing the hard disk partitions. It comes with a lot of Linux system utilities such as GParted, fsarchiver, filesystem tools and basic tools (editors, midnight commander, network tools). It can be used for both Linux and windows computers, and on desktops as well as servers. This rescue system requires no installation as it can be booted from a CD/DVD drive or USB stick, but it can be installed on the hard disk if you wish. The kernel supports all important file systems (ext3/ext4, xfs, btrfs, reiserfs, jfs, vfat, ntfs), as well as network filesystems such as Samba and NFS.

System and Networking Guides

In addition to the Quick Start Guide and SystemRescueCd documentation here are other guides:

Disk Partitioning: Introduction, Attributes, Tools, GPT Disks, How Grub boots, How to repair Grub
LVM Volume-Manager: Overview, How it works, Booting, Rootfs on LVM, Snapshots and Backups
Networking on Linux: network configuration, advanced routing, dport routing, load balancing

Project documentation

This project comes with good documentation. Here are the most important pages:

For the impatient:

Quick start guide: please read this if this is the first time you are using this system recovery cd.

Chapters about basic usage:

Chapters about advanced usage:

System tools included

GNU Parted: creates, resizes, moves, copies partitions, and filesystems (and more).
GParted: GUI implementation using the GNU Parted library.
FSArchiver: flexible archiver that can be used as both system and data recovery software
Partimage: popular opensource disk image software which works at the disk block level
ddrescue : Attempts to make a copy of a partition or floppy/Hard Disk/CD/DVD that has hardware errors, optionally filling corresponding bad spots in input with user defined pattern in the copy.
File systems tools (for Linux and Windows filesystems): format, resize, and debug an existing partition of a hard disk
Ntfs3g: enables read/write access to MS Windows NTFS partitions.
sfdisk saves and restores partition tables.
Test-disk : tool to check and undelete partition, supports reiserfs, ntfs, fat32, ext3/ext4 and many others
Memtest: to test the memory of your computer (first thing to test when you have a crash or unexpected problems)
Rsync: very-efficient and reliable program that can be used for remote backups.
Network tools (Samba, NFS, ping, nslookup, …): to backup your data across the network

Browse the short system tools page for more details about the most important software included.

Browse the detailed package list for a full list of the packages.

Advanced uses

SystemRescueCd is available for blind people. Now, the linux speakup screen reader is working well, and the speakup keymap is installed. This feature was tested by Gregory Nowak. Notes specific to using speakup in SystemRescueCD are available on the speakup info page

It is possible to make customized versions of the system. For example, you can add your own scripts, make an automatic restoration of the system. It is also possible to burn a customized DVD, with SystemRescueCd and 4GB for your data (backup for example). Read the manual for more details.

You can use SystemRescueCd to backup data from an unbootable Windows computer, if you want to backup the data stored on a Windows computer that cannot boot any more.

It is very easy to install SystemRescueCd on a USB stick. That is very useful in case you cannot boot from the CD drive. You just have to copy several files to the stick and run syslinux. The install process can be done from Linux or Windows. Follow instructions from the manual for more details.