Healing capabilities
What wrongs can they right?
All these distros will help you wiggle out a tricky situation, irrespective of the ailments that plague your installation. Many of them can also image and clone disks, identify and list damaged sectors, and extract recoverable data from physically damaged disks. However, some of them are more useful than others.
For instance, data recovery is the sole advertised purpose of Morpheusarch, and you can use the distro for little else. AIO System Rescue Toolkit has a handful of rescue tools to fix boot errors and rescue accidentally deleted files. The majority of its tools, though, are for fixing Windows installations, and can be used to fix all kinds of issues with the proprietary OS.
The tools bundled with ALT Linux Rescue can do a wide variety of repair jobs. In the hands of an expert, the distro can fix bootloaders, optimise filesystems, recover accidentally deleted files and partitions, and even diagnose network problems.
Similarly, you can use Systemrescuecd to rectify all sorts of issues with hard disks, including restoring the partition table. It can also save the contents of the filesystem to a compressed archive, securely delete files and recover accidentally deleted ones. You can also use the distro to rescue data from an
unbootable Windows machine. As in most other cases, UBCD goes further than the other contenders in that it can fix bootloaders but can also restore BIOS settings as well as restore and backup the CMOS. This is in addition to the usual rescue tasks such as recovering passwords and deleted files. The distro also features several diagnostic utilities.