In eWEEK Labs—as in any IT environment where systems need to be constantly copied, upgraded and repaired—any tool that makes these tasks easier is greatly appreciated. Recently, when attempting to resize partitions on a Labs system and not being able to find any of our commercial products for doing so, I came across SystemRescueCD, a great open-source tool that provided lots of capable features for repartitioning, imaging and repairing computer systems.
To use SystemRescueCD, I simply downloaded a 100MB ISO image and burned a CD from it. When I booted a system from this disk, it automatically loaded a bootable Linux system that provided several useful system management tools. For my purposes, the best tool in the SystemRescueCD is QtParted, a graphical partition management tool that let me create, delete and resize any partition on my systems, including Linux partitions and NTFS partitions. QtParted, which will look familiar to anyone who has used Symantecs PartitionMagic, worked very well on a wide variety of systems.
Also on the CD were drive-imaging tools, which, while capable, were not as effective as tools such as Symantecs Ghost. I also appreciated that the CD provided network access upon booting up.
For more information, go to www.sysresccd.org.
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