Free file recovery software for linux

The gzip Recovery Toolkit attempts to automate the recovery of data from corrupted gzip files (including tarballs) through a program called gzrecover. gzip Recovery Toolkit package is still very experimental at this point.
99% of "corrupted" gzip archives are caused by transferring the file via FTP in ASCII mode instead of binary mode. Please re-transfer the file in the correct mode first before attempting to recover from a file you believe is corrupted.
This program is provided AS IS with absolutely NO WARRANTY. It is not guaranteed to recover anything from your file, nor is what it does recover guaranteed to be good data. The bigger your file, the more likely that something will be extracted from it. Also keep in mind that this program gets faked out and is likely to "recover" some bad data. Everything should be manually verified.
Usage:
Run gzrecover on a corrupted .gz file. Anything that can be read from the file will be written to a file with the same name, but with a .recovered appended (any .gz is stripped). You can override this with the -o option.
To get a verbose readout of exactly where gzrecover is finding bad bytes, use the -v option to enable verbose mode. This will probably overflow your screen with text so best to redirect output to a file.
Once gzrecover has finished, you will need to manually verify any data recovered as it is quite likely that our output file is corrupt and has some garbage data in it. If your archive is a tarball, read on.
For tarballs, the tar program will choke because GNU tar cannot handle errors in the file format. Fortunately, GNU cpio (tested at version 2.5 or higher) handles corrupted files out of the box.
Heres an example:
$ ls *.gz
my-corrupted-backup.tar.gz
$ gzrecover my-corrupted-backup.tar.gz
$ ls *.recovered
my-corrupted-backup.tar.recovered
$ cpio -F my-corrupted-backup.tar.recovered -i -v
If you have a previous release, please note that the patches to GNU tar have been discontinued. They were only marginally successful at best and GNU cpio does what is needed out of the box and does it far better.
Enhancements:
- Documentation updates, including a man page, plus code cleanup to better enable inclusion in GNU/Linux packages and eliminate compilation warnings.

Make CD-ROM Recovery makes a bootable (El Torito) disaster recovery image (CDrec.iso), including backups of the linux system to the same CD-ROM (or CD-RW) if space permits, or to a multi-volume CD-ROM set. Otherwise, the backups can be stored on another local disk, NFS disk or (remote) tape.

After a disaster (disk crash or system intrusion) the system can be booted from the CD-ROM and one can restore the complete system as it was (at the time mkCDrec was run) with the command /etc/recovery/start-restore.sh

Disk cloning (clone-dsk.sh script) allows one to restore a disk to another disk (the destination disk does not have to be of the same size as it calculates the partition layout itself). A thrid script, restore-fs.sh, will restore only one filesystem to a partition of your choice, and the user can choose with which filesystem the partition has to be formatted.

Linux 2.2.x, 2.4.x and 2.6.x kernels are supported, and if size of the kernel is not too big a boot floppy can be made, otherwise a 2.88 Mb boot floppy will be emulated on CD-ROM.

MkCDrec supports ext2 , ext3, minix, xfs , jfs, reiserfs file systems, LVM and software RAID (multiple devices). Each file system is backed up as a compressed tar archive (including the tar log). The compress program used is the users choice (compress, gzip, bzip2, lzop,...)

But there is more: msdos, fat, vfat and ntfs mounted partitions are recognized and are saved as compressed dumps (on CD, tape, etc.)
The user has the possibility to encrypt all backups with openssl if desired (see the Config.sh configuration file for more information).

To restore your system completely just boot from the first CD-ROM made by mkCDrec and type "/etc/recovery/start-restore.sh " to restore everything from CD. Automatic Disaster Recovery and One Button Disaster Recovery are supported by mkCDrec too.
With the clone-dsk.sh script one can restore selective a disk or partitions to another free disk.

mkCDrec supports IDE (inclusive ATA), SCSI disks, hardware RAID based disks (e.g. Compaq SMART2 Disk Array), LVM and software RAID. With an El-Torito CD-ROM you can boot from an IDE or SCSI based CD-ROM drive on IA32/64, powermac and x86_64 GNU/Linux based computer systems only.

File is the open source implementation of the file command used on almost every free operating system (OpenBSD, Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD) and also on systems that use free software (including OS/2, DOS, MS Windows, etc.).

The file command, if youre not familiar with it, is a command-line tool that tells you in words what kind of data a file contains. Unlike MS-Windows, UNIX and other systems dont rely on filename extentions to tell you the type of a file, but look at the files actual contents. This is, of course, more reliable, but requires a bit of I/O.

The original file command shipped with Bell Labs UNIX but was unavailable in source form to the masses before Ians reimplementation.

This file command (and magic file) was originally written by Ian Darwin (who still contributes occasionally) and is now maintained by a group of developers lead by Christos Zoulas.

Whos using it?

Every known BSD distribution (FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Darwin/Mac OS X, etc)
Every known Linux distribution
The Apache httpd server mod_mime_magic module uses the file commands innards to make file type guessing more reliable under Apache HTTPD.

Cmos password recovery tools decrypts password stored in cmos used to access BIOS SETUP.
Works with the following BIOSes:
- ACER/IBM BIOS
- AMI BIOS
- AMI WinBIOS 2.5
- Award 4.5x/4.6x/6.0
- Compaq (1992)
- Compaq (New version)
- IBM (PS/2, Activa, Thinkpad)
- Packard Bell
- Phoenix 1.00.09.AC0 (1994), a486 1.03, 1.04, 1.10 A03, 4.05 rev 1.02.943, 4.06 rev 1.13.1107
- Phoenix 4 release 6 (User)
- Gateway Solo - Phoenix 4.0 release 6
- Toshiba
- Zenith AMI
With CmosPwd, you can also backup, restore and erase/kill cmos.
AWARD 4.50 have a backdoor, a generic password : AWARD_SW SOYO motherboard have "SY_MB" as master password for Award 4.51. CmosPwd give equivalent passwords for Award BIOS, not original one.
CmosPwd works and compiles under:
- Dos-Win9x,
- Windows NT/W2K/XP/2003,
- Linux,
- FreeBSD and NetBSD.
Enhancements:
- This version adds support for the VAIO EEPROM and Samsung P25 CMOS.

MEPISLite is for home users new to Linux; it is similar to SimplyMEPIS except that some packages have been changed to improve performance.

MEPIS Linux is a desktop Linux system that is also easy to configure as a dedicated server. MEPISLite is designed for both personal and business purposes.

It includes cutting-edge features such as a live/installation/recovery CD, automatic hardware configuration, NTFS partition resizing, ACPI power management, WiFi support, anti-aliased TrueType fonts, a personal firewall, KDE, and much more.

Crash Recovery for Linux sounds a bit superfluous. Linux is regarded as one of todays most stable Operating Systems. In the case of some hardware failure like a broken disk it can however be handy.
Of course your machine doesnt have to have linux installed to make use of the CRK kit. There are several uses and purposes for the CRK to be used. To name a few :
- recovery of a trashed LILO boot record. How many times does it happen that some person installs windows 98/95 after he/she installed linux? Well in that case windows 9X just overwrites the MBR record and linux wont be able to boot anymore.
- backup over the network in the form of tar.gz tarballs. Both FAT16, FAT32, ext2 and all filesystems which Linux supports in a read/write fashion can be taken care of. The strong part of the CRK is when a disk is replaced or repartitioning is being done. The CRK boots a complete mini linux with networking where all possible hardware which is inside the Linux kernel is available.
- Testing hardware of new intel based machines.
- Detecting versions and types of hardware. The Linux kernel holds a large database of hardware supported. Booting a linux kernel doesnt only resolve if the hardware is ok, it also show its specs. This can be handy if one wants to check-out an old/new PC which is for sale.
- Recovery of a misconfigured or hacked Linux system. Well that can happen. /etc/fstab can be wrong or the root password is unknown etc.
- make a tape backup of a disk which cant be booted anymore.
The CRK is based on RedHat Linux. I have always used RedHat systems, thats why. When my system needed maintenance the rescue floppy image which RedHat supplies didnt fullfill my needs.
Thats why i created the CRK. Lately i use Mandrake. How and why the CRK was created read the short history. The CRK is licensed under the GNU Public License (GPL).

Invisible IRC Project is a three-tier, peer distributed network designed to be a secure and private transport medium for high speed, low volume, dynamic content. IIP uses Trent that facilitates nickname and channel control.
Main features:
- Perfect Forward Security using Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange Protocol
- Constant session key rotation
- 128 bit Blowfish node-to-node encryption
- 160 bit Blowfish end-to-end encryption
- Chaffed traffic to thwart traffic analysis
- Secure dynamic routing using cryptographically signed namespaces for node Identification
- Node level flood control
- Seamless use of standard IRC clients
- Gui interface
- Peer distributed topology for protecting the identity of users
- Completely modular in design, all protocols are plug-in capable
Enhancements:
- System tray icon recovery on exporer crash (windows)
- Commandline -h argument displayed even if not configured (unix)
- Path fix for logfile location (unix)
- install-local added in Makefile (unix)
- Ignoring empty node.ref from server
- FreeBSD compatibility patch in socket code
- iip.log and mynode.ref also stored in ~/.iip/ (unix)
- Entropy gathering detects repeated sequences of characters and multibyte characters.