When Desktop Disaster Strikes, Linux Rides To The Rescue

A friend in need, the saying goes, is a friend indeed. And the next time your Windows PC goes belly-up at the worst possible time, your new best friend just might turn out to be a Linux rescue CD.

Linux is a popular choice for PC recovery and repair tasks for several reasons. For one thing, it is highly portable: Most distros offer "live" versions that can run entirely from a CD or other compact media. Some distros are so compact that they will fit on a USB drive or even on a set of floppy disks -- and still leave plenty of room for a suite of repair and recovery tools. That's helpful, since Linux supports a vast array of tools suitable for diagnosing PC problems and -- above all -- retrieving data from mangled, all-but-useless hard-disk file systems.

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