Free quick recovery for linux software for linux

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).

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.