A Linux distribution is an operating system made from a software collection that includes the Linux kernel and often a package management system. Linux users usually obtain their operating system by downloading one of the Linux distributions, which are available for a wide variety of systems ranging from embedded devices and personal computers to powerful supercomputers.
Knoppix, stylized KNOPPIX, is an operating system based on Debian designed to be run directly from a CD / DVD or a USB flash drive. It was first released in 2000 by German Linux consultant Klaus Knopper, and was one of the first popular live distributions. Knoppix is loaded from the removable medium and decompressed into a RAM drive. The decompression is transparent and on-the-fly.
A live CD is a complete bootable computer installation including operating system which runs directly from a CD-ROM or similar storage device into a computer's memory, rather than loading from a hard disk drive. A live CD allows users to run an operating system for any purpose without installing it or making any changes to the computer's configuration. Live CDs can run on a computer without secondary storage, such as a hard disk drive, or with a corrupted hard disk drive or file system, allowing data recovery.
SystemRescue is a Linux distribution for x86-64 and IA-32 computers. The primary purpose of SystemRescue is to repair unbootable or otherwise damaged computer systems after a system crash. SystemRescue is not intended to be used as a permanent operating system. It runs from a Live CD, a USB flash drive or any type of hard drive. It was designed by a team led by François Dupoux, and is based on Arch Linux since version 6.0. Starting with version 6.0, it has systemd as its init system.
A bootable business card (BBC) is a CD-ROM that has been cut, pressed, or molded to the size and shape of a business card. Alternative names for this form factor include "credit card", "hockey rink", and "wallet-size". The cards are designed to hold about 50 MB. The CD-ROM business cards are generally used for commercial product demos, are mailed to prospective customers, and are given away at trade shows.
Kanotix, also referred to as KANOTIX, is an operating system based on Debian, with advanced hardware detection. It can run from an optical disc drive or other media i.e. USB-stick without using a hard disk drive.
GHOST, now Symantec™ GHOST Solution Suite (GSS) for enterprise, is a disk cloning and backup tool originally developed by Murray Haszard in 1995 for Binary Research. The technology was acquired in 1998 by Symantec.
Bare-metal restore is a technique in the field of data recovery and restoration where the backed up data is available in a form that allows one to restore a computer system from "bare metal", i.e. without any requirements as to previously installed software or operating system.
In computing, data recovery is a process of retrieving deleted, inaccessible, lost, corrupted, damaged, or formatted data from secondary storage, removable media or files, when the data stored in them cannot be accessed in a usual way. The data is most often salvaged from storage media such as internal or external hard disk drives (HDDs), solid-state drives (SSDs), USB flash drives, magnetic tapes, CDs, DVDs, RAID subsystems, and other electronic devices. Recovery may be required due to physical damage to the storage devices or logical damage to the file system that prevents it from being mounted by the host operating system (OS).
GParted is a GTK front-end to GNU Parted and an official GNOME partition-editing application. GParted is used for creating, deleting, resizing, moving, checking, and copying disk partitions and their file systems. This is useful for creating space for new operating systems, reorganizing disk usage, copying data residing on hard disks, and mirroring one partition with another. It can also be used to format a USB drive.
DRBL is a NFS-/NIS server providing a diskless or systemless environment for client machines.
The terms Recovery disc, Rescue Disk/Disc and Emergency Disk all refer to a capability to boot from an external device, possibly a thumb drive, that includes a self-running operating system: the ability to be a boot disk/Disc that runs independent of an internal hard drive that may be failing, or for some other reason is not the operating system to be run.
Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office is a software package produced by Acronis International GmbH that aims to protect the system from ransomware and allows users to backup and restore files or entire systems from a backup archive, which was previously created using the software. Since 2020, Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office includes malware and Zoom protection. The software is used by technicians to deploy operating systems to computers and by academics to help restore computers following analysis of how viruses infect computers.
Quantian OS was a remastering of Knoppix/Debian for computational sciences. The environment was self-configuring and directly bootable CD/DVD that turns any PC or laptop into a Linux workstation. Quantian also incorporated clusterKnoppix and added support for openMosix, including remote booting of light clients in an openMosix terminal server context permitting rapid setup of a SMP cluster computer.
Wubi is a free software Ubuntu installer, that was the official Windows-based software, from 2008 until 2013, to install Ubuntu from within Windows, to a single file within an existing Windows partition.
gpart is a software utility which scans a storage device, examining the data in order to detect partitions which may exist but are absent from the disk's partition tables. Gpart was written by Michail Brzitwa of Germany. The release on the author's website is now older than the releases some distributions are using. It appears that Michail Brzitwa does not actively maintain the code, instead the various distributions appear to maintain their own versions.
Clonezilla is an open-source suite of disk cloning, disk imaging and system deployment utilities. Clonezilla Server Edition uses multicast technologies to deploy a single image file to a group of computers on a local area network. Clonezilla was designed by Steven Shiau and developed by the NCHC Free Software Labs in Taiwan.
Redo Rescue, formerly Redo Backup and Recovery, is a free backup and disaster recovery software. It runs from a bootable Linux CD image, features a GUI that is a front end to the Partclone command line utility, and is capable of bare-metal backup and recovery of disk partitions. It can use external hard drives and network shares.
Partition-Saving is a disk imaging utility for Linux, Windows and DOS environments that can save disk partitions in one of the several supported disk image formats.
