Which Live Linux Cds do you suggest? Or what subject direction should I search? What I am looking for is an OS that loads into the ram and allows me to recover files and data before I have to reformat the windows partition, which for some of my clients is the whole hard drive. I have tried a OSs called “Freeloader” and “Knoppix V 3.1” but could not get the freeloader to run and Knoppix to recover the files. Is there something out that is what I am looking for or is it something I will have to build (LFS)? I will do the research but I need to be pointed the correct direction. As always thank you in advance.

Hi
You might wanna try tomsrtbt, a single floppy distro that loads
in ram, find it here http://www.toms.net/
There are plenty other floppy distro's, do a search in the forum.
And there is also the linuxcare bootable business card, dont
know where to get it tho but it should be a credit card sized
cdrom.
And most common distro's like redhat, suse, mandrake do have
a rescue part on their cd's.
And on the latest linux format dvd there is the SimpleRescueCD, it's probably on the web also. I thought that
someone mentioned this in the forum somewhere
good luck

The real downshot to toms and Loaf and the rest of the floppy "rescue" disks is that none of them have yet to include ntfs support in their kernels. Honestly, if you have an NFS host around, the simplest thing I've found to do is use the Slack 8.0 install disks. I had to do this for a joker's laptop a while back:

http://www.clockwatching.net/~fin/fixed.html

A full flavored rescue CD with ncftp, tar, and oh my, smbmount! working would be brilliant in comparison, post back if you find anything like that.

Cheers,

Finegan

Please explain how you need to "recover files". Is this just copying files from an intact file system belonging to an OS that will no longer boot? Or do you need to recover files from a corrupted file system? What kind of file system do you need to recover files from?

Knoppix, which is Debian Woody on a live CD, should be very capable. So I'm a little surprised that it doesn't do what you need.

Use KNOPPIX

Hope that helps...

What I am trying to do is to be prepared when I go on a service call. I am trying to get to data when the OS will not boot up or the screen is a little too blue.
:)
To answer your question all of the above and all file systems. Am I asking for something that does not exist? Or am I thinking too small on a large subject? Any answer or study direction is always appraised.

SuSE does have a 'Live' evaluation CD. Although I haven't played with it in a while it may be worth a look. You can run SuSE from a CD without actually installing it on the local disks. From that I suppose you could mount a BSOD drive and do lord knows what with it.

I believe it's still available from their ftp servers/mirrors.

Okay, I would carry one or more of the Linux bootable "live" CD's like those at: http://old.lwn.net/Distributions/index.php3#cd. Linux has hardware and file system support for just about anything. Therefore you won't be scrambling to obtain drivers land special software like you do with Windows.

I would then also carry boot floppies that will get you into these CDROM for when you run across a machine that won't boot on CD's

I would also carry a single floppy boot disk like Tomsrtbt (http://www.toms.net/rb/) for times when there is no CDROM drive

Finally I would carry a prebuilt Linux/Windows hard drive that can be put in a machine for times when all else fails.

Thank you very much for the info!!!

www.leka.net
http://www.leka.net/modules.shtml

single floppy distro, with ntfs(read only) support