mkCDrec Utilities For Linux

The mkCDrec utilities are optional for mkCDrec itself, but are an added value for rescue and recovery purposes.

The utilities are staticly compiled and include parted, memtest, partimage, gpart, and recover. Memtest86 is also available for memory testing.

To improve the added value of your recovery/rescue CD-ROM. You will notice that links from mkCDrec CD-ROM are foreseen to the /cdrom/utilities part of the CD-ROM and that man pages of these tools are already available within mkCDrec main toolset.

Without installing the utilities you cannot use them (obvious), but it will not break any other functionality of the mkCDrec tools. A full restore remains possible (and disk cloning too), but you will not be able to resize a partition afterwards to name something.

Most of these utilities were compiled as static binaries, therefore, you can use those tools seperately too. If you know any tool which could useful to be included, please let me know... Since mkCDrec_utils_v0.5.7 you will notice that mkCDrec will use isolinux to boot from the CD-ROM instead of using syslinux floppy boot emulation.

But, this will only work if you use mkCDrec_v0.5.7 (or higher) as isolinux was first introduced in v0.5.7.

The famous Partition Editor of GNU software. The User Manual of parted is already part of mkCDrec.

An excellent memory testing tool.

A tool to make/restore partition of msdos/vfat/ext2/reiserfs file systems. The primary purpose to include this tool is to allow a restore of old partition images made by this tool.

Guess partition does what it implies. It can even recover destroyed partition tables, and therefore, maybe preventing a full restore. Useful in case if you do not make a mkcdrec on a regular basis.

An excellent tool to edit an EXT2 file system to recover lost files.

e2salvage is a utility which tries to recover a data from damaged ext2 partition. It may be used when e2fsck does not recover the broken ext2 filesystem. Before trying this tool read the man page (man e2salvage).

ext2resize, ext2prepare and ext2online are useful tools. ext2resize can increase (or decrease) the size of an unmounted ext2 filesystem. Be aware for ext2online one need a kernel patch (not likely installed). By the way, ext2resize does work too on an Ext3 filesystem! Be aware, one needs to apply S. Tweedie's kernel patch (ext3) and an updated ext2 filesystem e2fprogs-1.20 or higher (which are ext3 aware). Last 2 requirements are of course only needed in case if you want to work with ext3 filesystems.

Memtest86 is thorough, stand alone memory test for x86 architecture computers. BIOS based memory tests are only a quick check and often miss many of the failures that are detected by Memtest86.

The offline NT password editor (chntpw) is a little program wich enables you to view and change passwords in a Windows NT SAM user database. For example,

# cd mkcdrec; tar zxvf mkCDrec_v0.7.9_utils.tar.gz # ls -l utilities