Recently I have had to assist two friends with systems that were borked to the point of no longer being bootable. In both cases there had been warning signs that there was impending doom, like the machine spontaneously rebooting, or having to cold boot the laptop several times to get it to the windows login prompt.
Both individuals had a had the same response to these symptoms which was to ignore them and hope that they would go away like a mild case of the flu. Sadly with computers things never get better after the first symptoms arise, they only get worse and the prognosis is never good.
In any event I needed to dig into my bag of system recovery tools to try and retrieve lost data and repair the systems. In one case the laptop hard disk was failing and the other was infected to the point of paralysis with viruses and malware. For the record these were both Windows machines. (Maybe Windows users are S&M deviants of some kind?)
In both cases I had success with Trinity Rescue Kit . But this is not the only tool I use. Below is a brief overview of the tools I usually use:
Trinity Rescue Kit
This is a great distro for system rescue. It is a dedicated distro aimed primarily at rescuing windows based systems. Besides allowing one to boot up and attempt to retrieve data from failing hard disk using a variety of tools such as partd or ddrecsue , it also does:
- Virus scanning and removal,
- Window password reset,
- Undeletion and more.
There is a lot more info available on this distro's home page . It simply is quiet amazing how Linux tools can help save doomed windows boxes.
Knoppix
For Linux server I usually use the grand-daddy of live distributions - Knoppix. This distro can be used for Windows boxes too but is not a dedicated rescue kit. It is far more of a general purpose live linux distro. Its excellent hardware detection makes it a must have in any respectable Linux's technicians toolbelt.
General Purpose Linux Utilities
Besides partd , with its gnome based front-end gpartd , or ddrecsue already mentioned above there is the extremely usefull dd command line tool and a ddrescue derivative called dd_rescue . The various file-system checking tools like fsck, also come in handy. Once one has booted the live distro it is a case of firing up ssh and then copying what data you can across the network using the above tools.
Of course the best thing to do is to always backup your machine!