Darik’s Boot and Nuke (DBAN)ĭBAN is a boot disk that will securely wipe a hard disk clean. I took out my Puppy Linux CD, rebooted into Puppy, and was able to backup what she needed in less time that it took to originally boot into Windows! This was a huge time saver, and the customer appreciated that! 2.

It took about 15 minutes to fully boot and navigating was horribly slow. I was at an on-site job where my customer wanted to transfer all of her data from her old PC to a newer one however the C: drive was almost full (literally a few MB’s free), not to mention whatever else was on there. It’s a great tool if you can’t boot a system due to a virus, but would like to backup/recover any data before working on the system (just remember to check the files on the external drive to make sure the viruses didn’t attached themselves). Linux can read NTFS and FAT file systems and ignores any file system permissions set within Windows, so as long as the data is unencrypted, you should be able to read, write, copy, and move. I can then back up any data and copy it to an external drive. As long as the drive spins and is recognized in the BIOS, I can boot to Puppy and access the system hard drive. Puppy is my main tool when a customer running Windows can’t boot or access their hard drive due to a crash, virus, or system file corruption. It only requires 128 of RAM to run (I’ve ran it on less and it worked fine to browse the internet) and is pretty quick, even on aged machines. Puppy Linux is a live CD distribution that is small, lightweight, and can be booted directly to RAM.

All of these tools are available for free. Here is a descriptive list of tools, systems, and applications that will help you on the job or in the office that are open source and will run in a Linux environment or live CD (based on Linux). I use it to run my business and I use it as a tool while on the job no matter what type of system I am working on. Linux is my preferred operating system kernel of choice and I use it on my main system (and virtualize other OS’s). Open source software is one my favorite tech topics.

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