Today a colleague had some issues with logging on to Windows XP and getting to his files that he needed, and so, it gave me an opportunity to try out SystemRescueCD which is a Linux live CD, i.e, doesn’t require installation just runs straight from CD. I’ve heard it being mentioned several times for data recovery and fixing errors with peoples’ file systems and indeed it does come with read/write support and utilities for several different file systems such as ntfs, ext2/3/4.
Although in this case all that was required was the transference of files from the ntfs partition to external drive I just wanted to see what it was like, the download iso was only 246 MiB and I had Vista and ImgBurn to burn it onto CD on my laptop.
When you boot from the CD you are offered with a console prompt where you can choose several boot options, I just accepted the default and pressed Enter and chose the uk keymap, it then boots into a terminal environment where all the tools you require can be used, but I thought it would be easier to use the graphical environment which was just an extra command.
Although the graphical environment was nice, I couldn’t find a file manager so again resorted to terminal for browsing directories, and had to manually mount the ntfs partition and usb drive. I was dismayed to discover that there was no auto-detecting of file systems with option to mount easily available but I guess if you have a damaged partition table you don’t want to try that anyway. Managed to successfully transfer files across and that was that,I shutdown but it didn’t eject the disc before powering off which was annoying.
Overall, I guess I didn’t fully need to use the functionality of the disc. Any recent enough live CD should be sufficient for transferring files across ntfs and external usb drive. Definitely wouldn’t recommend it to someone not familiar with Linux
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