One of my favorite All-In-One dos bootable CD to troubleshoot computer problems is Hiren’s BootCD. Hiren’s Boot CD is a live CD containing various diagnostic programs such as partitioning agents, system performance benchmarks, disk cloning and imaging tools, data recovery tools, MBR tools, BIOS tools, and many others for fixing various computer problems. However, many of these tools are warez (pirated) and it cannot be used on some places because it is illegal.

If that is the case, you can try Trinity Rescue Kit. Back in 2001, Harakiri (one of Trinity Rescue Kit’s developer) had this great bootable dos CD which he created, packed with all great utilities for offline PC operations called “The Vault”. Unfortunately, the Vault consisted for 90% of software you should pay for. So distributing it in a legal way was certainly no option and he is not the guy that wants to spend his time in maintaining something that is illegal anyway. So he brewed on the idea of creating a free bootable Linux CD called Trinity Rescue Kit containing all available free tools that can help you in any way of rescueing your Windows installation.

Trinity Rescue Kit or TRK is a free live Linux distribution that aims specifically at recovery and repair operations on Windows machines, but is equally usable for Linux recovery issues. All you need to do is to download TRK iso file, burn it on a CD and boot the computer up using the TRK live CD. The latest method is it can boot from network over PXE. With version 3.3, it has the ability to act as a network bootserver itself, without any modifications to your local server.

Download Trinity Rescue Kit

Here’s a sumup of some of the most important features, new and old:

  • Easily reset windows passwords (backup and restore option in 3.3)
  • 4 different virusscan products integrated in a single uniform commandline with online update capability (5 in the latest version 3.3)
  • Full ntfs write support thanks to ntfs-3g (all other drivers included as well)
  • Clone NTFS filesystems over the network
  • Wide range of hardware support (kernel 2.6.19.2 and recent kudzu hwdata)
  • Easy script to find all local filesystems
  • Self update capability to include and update all virusscanners
  • Full proxyserver support
  • Run a samba fileserver (windows like filesharing)
  • Run a SSH server
  • Recovery and undeletion of files with utilities and procedures
  • Recovery of lost partitions
  • Evacuation of dying disks
  • UTF-8 international character support
  • 2 rootkit detection utilities (version 3.3)
  • Elaborated documentation (+manpages as of 3.3)

    • Do take note that Trinity Rescue Kit is a complete commandline based distribution, apart from a few tools like qtparted, links, partition image and midnight commander. Most of the time you’ll have to type commands to get the tools running. It’s not as easy as clicking an icon and that’s it. You should read the documentation to know what are the commandlines that can be used. An example to launch a virus scan using AVG, you’ll have to type “virusscan -a avg” in the console. So don’t be shocked to only see a linux console that says [root@trk]:(~)#

    [ Download Trinity Rescue Kit ]

    [tags]trinity, rescue, CD, bootable, recover[/tags]