Just Another Tech Blog

Today, I had the rather gratifying experience of being able to save a friend's data after his computer at school crashed. The computers at are school are sub-par to say the least, and so when my friend's computer crashed in our Introduction to Engineering class (don't ask...) I was hardly surprised. Any boot would take ages, and finally result in a blue screen of death. A registry error, it seemed. Now, seeing as the school does not like people messing around with their computers, I immediately thought of bringing in a live Linux CD to try and recover his data. I tried multiple CDs (Knoppix, BackTrack, miniPentoo, Ubuntu, etc.) but none of them booted. That is, they may have, but it would have taken longer than the hour and a half we had in that class (yes, the computer was that slow... it's a Dell). So, in a last effort, I remembered my trusty GParted LiveCD. This CD had a very basic interface and was not loaded with tons of features that would slow down the boot processes. So, I pop the CD in an wait, half an hour to be exact. But, things are going well, and I finally get to a command prompt. I didn't even try to get into a GUI, seeing as that would have probably taken the rest of the class. So, at the shell, I started getting to work on saving his data. Really, it was a very simple process. I simply mounted the hard drive partition with his data on it, and proceeded to copy it to my USB Flash Drive. A flawless rescue, made possible by the GParted LiveCD.
This is, of course, by far not the extent of the CD's power. Based on the powerful GParted partitioning tool, it has countless times served me well when I needed to partition a drive. Featuring the very functional FluxBox window manager and excellent device support, this CD is sure to boot on any system (even a horribly malfunctioning Dell, as I explained above). With the perfect combination of light weight (the iso is only 45MB) and function, the GParted LiveCD is a CD meant for every Linux user's toolkit.