Free hard drive recovery software for linux

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.

Kaboot Linux Operating system aims to provide an operating system which you can take anywhere and has all your favourite programs on.
Kaboot operating system is avaliable as a Live CD or Live USB you can take with you anywhere.
A number of different versions are avaliable, two optimised for size or speed, one for functionality, and one science based.
All containing a host of useful programs able to boot virtually any computer (meeting the minimum requirements) from CD and
USB.Kaboot is still in active development and if you find a bug or fix, you can let me know in the forums.
Enhancements:
- A network bug was fixed.
- A few debugging utilities were added.
- Hotplugging was implemented.

Phantomix is a Knoppix based Operating System running on a CD drive without using the hard drive.
Phantomix Live CD is configured to use the Tor and Privoxy software for anonymous internet communication.
Using Tor can help you anonymize web browsing and publishing, instant messaging, IRC, SSH, and other applications for your safety and security.
Known Issues:
- compared to direct internet connection, browsing is slow
- due to ad and junk filtering some sites may not work as expected (googlemail, ezboard)
- sometimes pages have to be reloaded very often until they are displayed correctly.

Rails Live CD project was born on Ezra Zygmuntowicz blog and realized with help from Brian Ketelsen. Rails Live CD is based on PCLinuxOS which is a great Linux distribution for creating LiveCDs. More information at PCLinusOS.com
To use it, just download, burn and reboot! Or if you have a virtualization or emulation engine like Qemu, Parallels or VMWare it is even easier.
Many people are curious about Ruby on Rails but dont want to go through the pain of installing it locally. The Rails Live CD solves this problem by allowing you to have a fully operating Ruby on Rails development environment without even touching your hard drive!
Others are interested in developing Ruby on Rails applications in Linux but dont have the skills or the patience to do the installation and compiling required to get Ruby on Rails running on a typical Linux installation.
Rails Live CD allows you to install directly to your hard drive and walks you through the process. No compiling or ./configure ./make ./make install dancing required.
Enhancements:
- Rails 1.1.16
- RadRails 0.7.1
- jEdit
- emacs
- Subversion
- MySQL 5 & MySQL Administrator
- SQLite
- PostgreSQL 8
- Firefox 1.5 with several web development extensions
- Gems : ZenTest, Rake, Rails, OpenID, Mogrel, Capistrano
- KDevelop, Kate
- TightVNC

KungFu DVD Ripper is a GStreamer based DVD ripper.

KungFu creates backups of your DVDs, saving them as .oggs on your hard drive. It encodes the backup using patent-free codecs, Theora for video and Vorbis for audio.

KungFu is not designed for producing backups that fit within a certain file size (say, for burning onto CD); instead, it is designed to produce backups of consistent quality while maintaining the lowest average file size possible (for building a video library on your hard drive).

OpenBSD Live-CD Firewall is an OpenBSD-based pf (packet filter) firewall, with DNS, squid, NAT, and a DHCP server (dnsmasq) for internal clients preconfigured. Settings and log files can be saved to a USB device.
Saved settings will be restored at the next reboot. Additional security related software is available on the CD (arpwatch, honeyd, ntop, portsentry, etc.)
Main features:
- runs without modifying the hard-drive
- external interface will be configured via DHCP - should work with a Cable Modem connection
- DHCP service for internal LAN
- caching DNS
- Squid Proxy
- NAT (masquerading)
- save your configuration and passwords to an USB mass-storage device (usb-pen drive) [ /backup/etc2usb ]
- If the USB device is connected at boot time these settings will be used.
- save all log files to an USB mass-storage device for future analysis [ /etc/log2usb ]
Enhancements:
- The Squid proxy server works now in transparent mode without further configuration.

FDMS-3 Ripper is a Perl program for extracting the tracks from the FDMS-3 filesystem. I recently bought a Fostex FD-8 multitrack hard disk recorder for recording music. It works great, but I was disappointed to discover that, although it uses a standard external SCSI hard disk, there was no way to "rip" the recorded tracks from the hard drive to my PC over the SCSI port. The alternatives were to use the analog-out to re-record each track using my soundcard (resulting in loss of quality and loss of synch between tracks), or buying a $500 ADAT card for my PC.

I decided that I would try to figure out a way to rip the music directly over the SCSI port. The FD-8 uses a proprietary Fostex filesystem, FDMS-3. I decided to hook it up to my PC and probed the drive. I was able to figure out the basic layout of the filesystem pretty quickly. Note: this is designed to hard disks formatted in the FDMS-3 "Mastering" mode, which stores the audio data in uncompressed format.

In order to use the program, you will need to take the hard disk that has the FDMS-3 filesystem on it and hook it up to your PC (mine is a SCSI drive -- dont know if this will work with one of the internal IDE drives you can hook up to the FD-8). Make sure that Linux can see the drive (dont try to mount it, though!). You might want to have a look at SCSI-2.4-HOWTO to get the drive recognized. My external hard disk is located at "/dev/sda", but yours could end up elsewhere.

Next, you need to make sure you have the following on your system: perl, sox and fileutils (for the "dd" utility). Security Warning Unfortunately, this program presents significant security issues, so be careful with it. The script needs to be able to access the hard disk directly, so you can either run it as root (not safe), or change the permissons for the hard disk device (in my case, "/dev/sda"). Run the program with "./fdms3rip /dev/sda" (substituting the actual location of your hard disk).

This will list all of the programs present on the hard disk. Then, run it again with the number of the program you want to fetch off the hard disk: "./fdms3rip /dev/sda 5" to get all of the recorded tracks for program number 5. After waiting a bit, you should now have a bunch of WAV files on your Linux machine. Warning This program will create and erase files with the names "dir" and "header" in the directory it is run from. It would be best to run this program from a clean directory, just to make sure there are no problems.

TINA is an open source environment developed to accelerate the process of image analysis research.

TINA provides functionality to assist in all areas of image analysis including handling of image, image feature and geometrical data; statistical and numerical analysis of data; GUI development as well as transmission and containment of data.

TINA also provides a range of high-level analysis techniques for both machine vision (3D object location, 2D object recognition, temporal-stereo depth estimation, etc) and medical image analysis (MR tissue segmentation, blood flow analysis, etc).

Now, thanks to the magic of KNOPPIX, you can experience TINA without installing any software. Simply place the CD into the CD drive of any PC and reboot.

Place the CD into the CD drive of any (reasonably modern) PC and reboot. The PC must be able to boot from the CD drive: if your own bootloader or windows starts up, reboot again and check your bios settings (you will probably be prompted to press DEL during startup). On the bios settings screen, check the boot devices: the first should be the floppy drive, the second the CD drive and the third the hard drive (possibly with a fourth option of booting from a network device). Check you motherboard manual for more details.

The KNOPPIX CD contains a live Linux distribution based on Debian, with a KDE 3 desktop. The TINA libraries are in /usr/local/TINA5, and some TINA demos are in /usr/local/Tina5/tina-tools/toolkits/knoppix_tookit (they can be accessedvia the desktop icons).