[Pc_Support] Re: Windows XP Rescues -- INSERT (Linux Live CD)

[Bryan J. Smith <b.j.smith at ieee.org>]

From: Tim McDonough <tim at mcdonough.net>
> Does there exist or can someone suggest what search terms to use
> for a rescue CD for Windows XP?

The problem is that Gates himself removed the ability to boot into
a full "CMD.EXE" shell from day one in NT 3.1, even though it was
based on OS/2.  Gates required the Graphical Display Interface (GDI)
before NT would boot, which has become the Achilles heel of NT.

Microsoft re-introduced the Recovery Console in NT 5.0+ (2000+),
but it still doesn't allow all sorts of access -- from the filesystem
to the registry.  Once again, some core subsystems require on the
GDI, including much of the filesystem and registry support.

Microsoft was working towards a new CLI (command line interface)
environment MONAD.  No one knew if it would just be a ".NET 
scripting environment" inside of NT 6.0 "Longhorn" (most likely), or
if it would be a full CLI boot environment for when the GDI -- now,
WGF (Windows Graphics Foundation -- GDI+DX+.NET).  But we'll
never know since it's been canned.

> What I'd like is a bootable CD that allow a network connection and 
> access to the PC hard disk. There have been several times when I have 
> had PCs fail to boot because of a missing or corrupt file and ideally 
> I'd like to be able to make sure key documents, etc. are copied off if 
> possible before trying to repair or recover from the Windows CDROM. 
> This seems like it would be especially useful for laptops where it's 
> not always easy to pop out the drive and hook it to another system as 
> a slave.

This is exactly why Linux Live CDs exist.

To boot into an environment with networking, a NTFS read-only** driver
and other support.  It's much more feature-full than a Microsoft DOS +
Network Client boot disk, hence the popularity.

As of January 2003, there is even a full NT registry editor for Linux.

The most popular Linux Live CD build system is Knoppix (although
be wary of some releases with a lot of non-freely redistributable
software out there):  
  http://www.knoppix.org/  

One of the first "canned" releases for NT was the "Password Reset"
CD.  As of 2003, it had evolved into all the basic tools you need to
read NTFS, hack the registry or, it's original purpose, reset the
password (of a non-DC):  
  http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/faq.html  

More recently there has been an effort for an universal security
CD for doing all sorts of things -- from reading NTFS with via
Captive**, Anti-Virus, network/wireless support, computer
forsensics, etc... called INSERT:  
  http://www.inside-security.de/insert_en.html  

Lastly, someone has built an "Ultimate Boot CD" around INSERT
and other tools, although it probably contains a lot of software
that is not supposed to be redistributed (at least there's a lot of
software that cannot legally be freely redistributed):  
  http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/  

-- Bryan

**NOTE:  _Never_ write to a NTFS filesystem from anything _but_ the
NT installation that created it -- _not_ even the same NT version/SP,
because there are SIDs tied to the registry which is local to that
NT installation.  The only way around this is via the "Captive" user-
space driver based on ReactOS (a NT-like/compatible GNU system) 
in Linux (which is very, very slow -- long story):  
  http://www.jankratochvil.net/project/captive/  

I'm doing a presentation to the St. Louis UNIX User's Group (SLUUG)
next week on Linux-NT interoperability, as well as NT recovery via
Linux.  In a nutshell, NTFS was _not_ designed well, and Microsoft
has tried to address this with the defunct "CairoFS" (NT 4.0 "Cario" /
"Cario" technology / vaporware) and, now, WinFS (NT 6.0 "Longhorn"
/ WinFX technology / [might as well be] vaporware).


--
Bryan J. Smith   mailto:b.j.smith at ieee.org