“Live” [insert-media-here] OS distributions have been around for a while, but in the last few years they’ve really come into their own. It wasn’t that long ago that one of the most useful tools to a PC tech was an MS DOS bootable floppy with a collection of hardware diagnostic tools. Today, it’s hard to even find a floppy drive, let alone a collection of diags that would easily fit on a single disk. So why am I writing about live distros? A recent experience with a VMware virtual machine reminded me of why I keep all these live distros around. I had a virtual server that I’d configured originally with a small 4GB virtual drive. I later increased that to 15GB, but forgot about the fact that windows won’t let you modify a partition that the OS is on. (more specifically one with a page file). Thankfully I had a few of those live distros on my laptop’s hard drive as ISO images. I mounted a Knoppix 3.6 image and rebooted the virtual machine with it. One of the utilities included with Knoppix is QPartEd (a frontend for gparted) which works much like Partition Magic allowing you to extend partitions to fill the entire drive. I extended the partition, saved, rebooted the VM and after a quick disk check, everything was the way I wanted it. While distros like Knoppix are the swiss army knives of the LiveOS generation, there are other more single-minded tools. One such tool that should also have worked in this situation is the GPartEd LiveCD. It’s a distro focused only on partition modification. It’s tiny by comparison with Knoppix and will fit on a 3″ CD. With a little finesse it could probably be written onto small low-end flash drive as well. I can’t possibly cover all the neat LiveOS distributions out there, but the next time you need a bootable toolkit, try one out. Here’s a short list to get you started: http://www.frozentech.com/content/livecd.php
TechThink
An IT geek's weblog
Yay! I got the captcha code right!
Anyway, I myself use knoppix very often. Whether it’s repairing a system that won’t boot, or backing up data on a failing drive, its value has proved itself immeasurable. I can’t count the number of times I’ve counted on it. The only gripe I’ve had is that NTFS write support is not activated by default. In fact, I’ve never gotten it to work, which makes repair of XP and NT systems impossible since changes can’t be persisted.
Did you know that Windows has something of an equivalent live CD? It’s called WinPE, and apparently comes with all sorts of useful tools for windows systems. I’ve never had the opportunity to use it, but it’s something to keep in mind.
Yea, I’m still tweaking the whole captcha system. Trying to find a balance between readability and blocking the OCRing spambots.
The NTFS write support issue is something I’ve run into before, particularly with older versions of Knoppix. Recent versions of Knoppix include the ntfs-3g package which has better support than the old kernel drivers. (That is to say you can write without the risk of corrupting your NTFS partition) WinPE is easier for many people since you’re actually running a stripped down version of Windows. I use both; the choice just depends on what I need to do.