The range of tools on offer
What’s in the goody bag?
Should you be looking for a wide range of repair tools and utilities, you’ll be disappointed with Morpheusarch. The distro has a very focused approach and only really includes Testdisk, along with its companion Photorec utility, for recovering files. The tools support all popular file systems and can identify files in over 400 formats. In addition to files, you can also use them to find lost partitions, rebuild the boot sector, fix FAT tables, locate the backup superblock and more. Experienced users can use its Arch base to fetch other rescue tools.
Another Arch-based rescue distro, Systemrescuecd is a slightly better option. Unlike Morepheusarch, this one ships with several repair and rescue tools and utilities, and supports all the important filesystems. There are multiple recovery tools, filesystem-specific repair tools, and a couple of boot images including HDT to query the hardware. There’s also Fsarchiver, which can help save and restore a partition table, or the contents of a filesystem, to a compressed archive file.
Then there’s AIO System Rescue Toolkit, which readily admits to not shipping with the entire gamut of rescue tools on offer. It instead includes only the most useful ones that its creator, a skilled technician, has used out in the field to fix machines. Besides tools like Boot Repair, Clonezilla and Testdisk, there are also a couple of stress-testing and benchmarking tools. The primary goal of the distro, however, is to fix Windows machines, and it has the largest collection of tools for this purpose as compared to the other options in this Roundup.
Stress-testing and benchmarking utilities are also included in ALT Linux Rescue, which packs in over a hundred CLI tools, including several versatile ones. The distro also has several utilities to help recover deleted files and fix common issues with both Linux and Windows installations.
Ultimate Boot CD (UBCD) leads the pack with the largest and most diverse collection of utilities. You can use the distro to query and stress-test hardware and peripherals connected to a system. It can be used to restore BIOS settings as well as to restore and backup the CMOS. UBCD enables you to fix bootloaders, recover lost passwords and deleted files and will also help you tweak the Windows Registry without booting into the installation.