Sometimes, no matter how much you try to protect your computer, you need to get down and dirty with the hardware. Sometimes it's the obvious. I never cease to be amazed at how many PC problems turn out to be loose cables or -- the shame of it all! -- an unplugged electrical cord. But, other times, it will be you vs. your PC's internal workings in a battle for system superiority.

It's for times like those that you need the kind of repair tools that Lincoln Spector talks about in his article 6 downloadable boot discs that could save your PC. My one concern with his tale is that he doesn't mention what I consider to be the best of all the system repair boot disks: SystemRescueCd 1.02.

I'll be the first to admit that SystemRescueCd is not for people who still think of their PC as a magic box. It's a Gentoo Linux-based tool for experts who at least know their way around partition tables and file systems. On the other hand, if you're at the point where you need any system rescue/boot utilities you're well past the point where you should be fooling around with your computer anyway unless you know what you're doing.

SystemRescueCd comes with all the system repair essentials. It includes low-level disk partition programs such as GParted and sfdisk and disk repair tools like TestDisk and Partimage. If your file system is intact, it also comes with one of my favorite file management tools: Midnight Commander. If you're an old-hand at MS-DOS, you'll immediately recognize Midnight Commander as a clone of the great MS-DOS Swiss-army knife utility program: Norton Commander.

Unlike some repair programs, you can use SystemRescueCd with almost any 32 or 64-bit PC operating system or file system, including EXT2/3, FAT (file allocation table), ReiserFS/4, and NTFS (NT File System), which is usually the trickiest file system to work with. You can also run it from either a bootable CD or a USB-stick.

Where SystemRescueCd really moves beyond the rest is its unmatched support for networks. Not only can you connect a semi-dead PC to a network so you can pull vital files from it, you can also use SystemRescueCd to boot and repair other PCs on the network. In the newest version, 1.02, you can even use OpenVPN, pptpclient, openswan, and vpnc to work remotely over a VPN (virtual private network) to repair say a colleague's PC in their hotel room.

I'm saying this by the way, not just from what SystemRescueCd's developers claim, I'm saying this as someone who has used this mini-Linux distribution to repair dozens of systems over the years including Macs, Linux PCs and servers and Windows systems running everything from Windows 98 to Vista to Server 2003. Some of these repairs were real nightmares, but SystemRescueCd always came through. So, if you know your way around computers and sometimes you need to do some repair work, I cannot recommend SystemRescueCd highly enough. It's simply the best of the best for PC repair.

Original link: http://blogs.computerworld.com/d...