Opensourceinfo

Finnix is a self-contained, bootable Linux CD distribution ("LiveCD") for system administrators, based on Debian testing. You can mount and manipulate hard drives and partitions, monitor networks, rebuild boot records, install other operating systems, and much more. Finnix includes the latest technology for system administrators, with Linux kernel 2.6, LVM2, encrypted partitions, etc. And above all, Finnix is small; currently the entire distribution is over 300MB, but is dynamically compressed into a bootable image under 100MB. Finnix is not intended for the average desktop user, and does not include any desktops, productivity tools, or sound support, in order to keep distribution size low.

INSERT (Inside Security Rescue Toolkit) is a complete, bootable linux system. It comes with a graphical user interface running the fluxbox window manager while still being sufficiently small to fit on a credit card-sized CD-ROM. INSERT contains a multitude of useful tools to be at your hand in a variety of situations: full read-write support for NTFS-partitions using captive, network analysis (e.g. nmap, tcpdump), disaster recovery (e.g. gpart, partimage, testdisk), virus scanning (Clam Antivirus), computer forensics (e.g. chkrootkit), surf the internet (e.g. links-hacked, AxY FTP)

Currently there are 2 versions: a floppy and usb version. The floppy version is a so called rescue disk which is a compilation of uclibc and busybox among other utilities. It even has a ssh client provided by dropbear (congrats to the author) and some filesystem tools. For more info go to the download section. The USB version is more than just a rescue disk. It's based on Gentoo and contains various other programs/utilities such as network related tools (nmap, ettercap). For a full list go to the 'package list' section.

SystemRescueCd is a linux system on a bootable cdrom for repairing your system and your data after a crash. It also aims to provide an easy way to carry out admin tasks on your computer, such as creating and editing the partitions of the hard disk. It contains a lot of system utilities (parted, partimage, fstools, ...) and basic ones (editors, midnight commander, network tools). It aims to be very easy to use: just boot from the cdrom, and you can do everything. The kernel of the system supports most important file systems (ext2/ext3, reiserfs, xfs, jfs, vfat, ntfs, iso9660), and network ones (samba and nfs).

Trinity Rescue Kit (TRK) is a bootable Linux distribution aimed specifically at offline operations for Windows and Linux systems such as rescue, repair, password resets and cloning. It has custom tools to easily recover deleted files, clone Windows installations over the network, perform antivirus sweeps with two different antivirus products, reset windows passwords, read and write on NTFS partitions, edit partition layout and much much more. Trinity Rescue Kit is mostly based on Mandriva Linux and heavily adapted start-up scripts.