Disaster Recovery Tool: Secure Knoppix Live CD

Ignoring its original intent, this is a wonderful tool for disaster recovery with both network and mountable devices on which to rescue data. You likely will still want whatever tools you have collected over time to diagnose things like hardware problems. And we're root, so we still do need to be extremely careful about what we do. I had no trouble using fdisk to re-format our nephew's second hard drive and allocate partitions.

The way the people who put this together went about it was very impressive. Instead of hard-wiring everything in, they made skillful use of soft-links. Once I noticed that /etc/hosts etc. were soft-links, it didn't take long to do a script on a floppy to copy what I really wanted from it to /tmp, remove the links and replace them with references to the files in /tmp.