A colleague recently dropped his computer off to me and asked me to clean it out for him. While it would have been a simple matter to reformat the hard drive, I found myself looking out on the web for resources. I did that because it was an old machine running Windows XP Home Edition and none of the original software was available…worse, the computer lacked an ethernet card so no high-speed internet connection was possible.

Although the computer was eventually cleaned out, I stumbled across these resources:

• Trinity Rescue Kit – includes tools to reset windows passwords, 4 different virusscan products integrated in a single uniform commandline with online update capability, full ntfs write support thanks to ntfs-3g (all other drivers included as well)
• PLOP Linux – “PLoP Linux is a small distribution that can boot from CD, DVD, USB flash drive (UFD), USB harddisk or from network with PXE. It’s designed to rescue data from a damaged system, backup and restore operating systems, automate tasks and more.”
• F-Secure Rescue CD

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