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Lonnie's Windows Commands

It's important to note that these are Live CDs. That means there is no installing them; just download the ISO and burn to a CD (or install to a USB flash drive if you're familiar with the process).

If you use one of these on a system that has a high end SCSI card or in some cases a little known SATA controller you might need to load additional drivers to allow the Live CD operating system to 'see' the hard drives. 

gparted - gparted is a great product. It's similar to the commercial product Partition Magic, only free (as in freedom). Booting up with this disk will allow you to see all of the partitions on the machine as well as the file system types. It's saved the day for me more than once - I've ran across Windows systems that would show a drive completely unpartitioned in Disk Management that gparted would see and access with no problem. In addition to creating, deleting, resizing, and formatting your hard drives, you can mount those drives and copy the files around with Thunar, a GUI file manager. This is a must have in any SE's bag of tricks.

g4l (ghost 4 linux) - g4l is a product similar to Symantec's Ghost commercial product. It allows you to 'image' a machines' hard drive and save that to another disk or FTP server and then back again. Fantastic for making a backup of a system that you're about to make massive changes on in case you need to roll back later.

Knoppix - Knoppix is probably the most famous of the Live CD Linux projects, and certainly one of the most popular and largely responsible for making Live CDs popular. Based on Debian, this Live CD sports a fully functional desktop environment (defaults to KDE for those that care). Knoppix comes with a great deal of tools (it's a complete desktop replacement, after all) that can come in useful in many different ways, such as network testing, hardware testing, data recovery, etc. That's not enough for you? With the new ntfs-3g driver, you can even read/write to NTFS partitions. Very cool.

Darik's Boot and Nuke - If you're anything like me, when a hard drive leaves your care due to an upgrade, failure, etc. you get a nagging feeling in the back of your mind that keeps you up at night. With DBAN, you can wipe hard drives just like the Department of Defense (and get some sleep at night). This distribution has one purpose - to destroy data. I'd highly recommend using this before putting your old laptop up on eBay. While it's true that it can't help in the case of a completely failed drive, it's helpful in most situations. Besides, for those completely failed drives, everyone should have an industrial hard drive degausser.

Damn Small Linux (DSL) - On occasion I've ran into a system that the CD/DVD drive simply won't work correctly or it simply doesn't have one to begin with. That's why I keep a 128MB USB drive loaded with Damn Small Linux; a lightweight Linux desktop environment with a surprising amount of functionality packed into 50MB (yes, megabytes). It also works from a Live CD as well, so take your pick.

memtest86 - One of the most difficult problems to troubleshoot for a SE can be faulty RAM. memtest86 is a good place to start if you suspect bad RAM might be the culprit. It's a useful package and it comes as it's own stand alone live CD and as part of many other distributions. It's a little out of date, but it should work on most machines. For those machines that it doesn't work on ...

memtest86+ - Like memtest86, memtest86+ is a great utility for testing for bad RAM. It's constantly updated as well which is a major plus (Get it? Thanks, I'll be here all week). It has it's own Live CD version and also comes along as part of larger distributions, making it a very, very useful tool.

BackTrack - Whenever I'm tasked by the 'powers that be' to don my security hat and become a penetration tester, BackTrack is one of the tools I use. It's a live CD that focuses purely on security; or more accurately, finding where the lack of security is. But as a SE, you can use it on your own machines to see where your weak spots are. Run it before a penetration tester shows up and the conversation you have with your boss at the end of the week won't be nearly as bad.

Helix - Helix is another security distribution. It's focus however is on forensics. It's been specially designed not to alter data on the host computer even by accident. If one of your servers gets hacked, being largely responsible in finding out what was accessed and maybe even who was responsible might help you keep your job.

Ultimate Boot CD (UBCD) - If ever there was a Swiss Army Knife of live CDs, it would probably be UBCD. It comes with more rescue/antivirus utilities than you'll probably need - and if you do need them all at once, consider another line of employment. It's a fantastic work of ingenuity to keep all of this software updated (frequently, I might add), and my hat goes off to the UBCD folks. Failed Windows 2003 server? UBCD to the rescue! Failed Redhat 4 ES server? UBCD to the rescue! No distribution that I've used so far has such a diverse suite of rescue and hardware testing tools.

System Rescue CD (SRCD)  - System Rescue CD is a distribution that it's name speaks for itself. It has a very thorough suite of tools (not as many as UBCD) but it's real strength that I've found lies in it's website; it's a Wiki that has some great information and a few how-tos on using SRCD. When you've got your boss calling you every five minutes wanting an update on a failed sever you don't have time to research 99 different arguments for a command line utility.

Trinity Rescue Kit (TRK) - Trinity Rescue Kit is another rescue focused distribution with heavy Windows rescue capabilities, with everything from passwords to full read/write NTFS support. For those of you that are tasked to push the Microsoft boulder uphill, this is a must have.

Frenzy - Yes, I know this isn't Linux (it's FreeBSD based). But, alas, I couldn't not mention it. I've found it to be far to useful to run on machines that were slated to run a BSD variant, only to find out thanks to Frenzy that it would have been a bad idea. If you support BSD environments, this is a great one to keep handy.

These are all great purpose-built distributions that can save your job under the right circumstances. That said however, just downloading these and burning them to CD isn't enough; play with them. Load them up on a test machine and see what they can do! Read the documentation before you get into a situation where you'll need them. Remember: Michelangelo didn't pick up a paint brush for the first time five minutes before he painted the Sistine Chapel.