SystemRescueCd

Description: SystemRescueCd is a Linux system on a bootable CD-ROM for repairing your system and recovering your 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 partitions of the hard disk. It contains a lot of system utilities (parted, partimage, fstools, ...) and basic tools (editors, midnight commander, network tools). It is very easy to use: just boot the CDROM. The kernel supports most of the important file systems (ext2/ext3, reiserfs, reiser4, xfs, jfs, vfat, ntfs, iso9660), as well as network filesystems (samba and nfs).

You can find more details about the recent changes made in SystemRescueCd in the news section of this website. Below are the recent news that give you more details about the new features introduced in SystemRescueCd.

New features introduced in SystemRescueCd-1.1.0-beta

* kernel recompilation: There is a new documentation about building a customized SystemRescueCd with your own kernel
* customization: You can now install new packages to SystemRescueCd by doing an advanced customization.
* nameif: It allows you to specify the name of each ethernet interface using the mac address.
* backstore: It allows you to keep your changes when you reboot sysresccd

Major features introduced in SystemRescueCd-1.0.x

* You can now install new packages to SystemRescueCd by doing an advanced customization.
* New option root=auto to boot the first linux system found on the hard-disk
* SystemRescueCd has been ported to unicode (utf8)
* Use SystemRescueCd remotely with VNC-server
* New boot options for advanced ethernet configuration
* How to use Xvesa when Xorg fails to start, so that you can always get the graphical environment to work.
* New chapter in the handbook that explains How to manage remote servers using SystemRescueCd
* The GPT disklabel is the new generation partition table that supports large disks (over 2TB) and more than four partitions.
* The autorun feature has been rewritten. It supports more options and scripts can be downloaded from an http web server.
* Network booting via PXE can download the sysrcd.dat filesystem through TFTP as well as HTTP
* SystemRescueCd-1.0.1 is now based on unionfs and it comes with JWM as the default windows mananager.

System tools included

* GNU Parted creates, resizes, moves, copies partitions, and filesystems (and more).
* GParted GUI implementation using the GNU Parted library.
* Partimage saves / restores partitions to an image file on another partition or to another system.
* File systems tools (e2fsprogs, reiserfsprogs, reiser4progs, xfsprogs, jfsutils, ntfsprogs, dosfstools): format, resize, and debug an existing partition of a hard disk
* Ntfs3g: enables read/write access to MS Windows NTFS partitions.
* sfdisk saves / restores partition table (and more).
* Test-disk tool to check and undelete partition, supports reiserfs, ntfs, fat32, ext2/3 and many others
* Network tools (Samba, NFS, ping, nslookup, ...)

Browse the short system tools page for more details about the most important software included.

Browse the detailed package list for a full list of the packages.
Advanced uses

SystemRescueCd is available for blind people. Now, the linux speakup version 1.5-2.0(CVS) screen reader is working well, and the speakup keymap is installed. This feature was tested by Gregory Nowak. Please note that current versions of the SystemRescueCD do not include speakup. The last version of SystemRescueCD to include speakup was 0.3.7. We apologize for this inconvenience. This information will be updated in the future as this situation changes. More information on this issue, as well as notes specific to using speakup in SystemRescueCD 0.3.7, is available on the speakup info page.

It is possible to make customize versions of the CD. For example, you can add your own scripts, to make an automatic restoration of the system. It's also possible to burn a customized DVD, with SystemRescueCd and 4.2 GB for your data (backup for example). Read the manual for more details. There is a new manual chapter that explains How you can burn a DVD+RW from SystemRescueCd

It is very easy to install SystemRescueCd on an USB stick. That's very useful in case you can't 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. Follow instructions from the Manual for more details.

Screenshots: