November 2018, “Staff Pick” Project of the Month – SystemRescueCd

For our November “Staff Pick” Project of the Month, we selected SystemRescueCd, a Linux system rescue disk as a bootable CD-ROM or USB stick.

SystemRescueCd is a Linux system rescue disk available as a bootable CD-ROM or USB stick for administering 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 (for more information on the system tools included, visit the official project website). 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, or from the network using PXE. But it can be installed on the hard disk if you wish. It comes with up-to-date kernels to provide support for recent hardware and also for all important file systems (ext2/ext3/ext4, xfs, btrfs, ntfs, reiserfs, vfat), as well as network filesystems (samba and nfs).

SystemRescueCd has several advanced uses:

• It is available for blind people since the Linux speakup screen reader is working well, and the speakup keymap is installed.
• 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.
• 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.

[ Download SystemRescueCd ]