Boot CD - Linux Live CD - Windows Live CD

Boot CD

A boot CD is a CD that you can boot your computer from instead of the hard drive. This will allow you to perform maintenance or other tasks independent from you computer operating system. Also if your computer operating system is not working you can use a boot CD to possibly correct the problems. I use a DOS bootable CD to image and restore my lab computers. It takes me about ten minutes each morning to restore 30 computers with a fresh operating system each day. No matter what my student did to the computers, and they have admin rights, I can quickly bring the computers back to a known good configuration. All I have to do is maintain one image with all the latest security patches, updates, and programs and I use this image to clone all the other computers. This saves me huge amounts of time and frees me for other tasks.

Live CD

I also use a Live CD with free Open Source programs to do, data recovery, maintenance on hard drives, memory testing, virus scanning, troubleshooting, and other tasks on the computer. Live CDs usually run a Linux operating system with free Open Source programs like GParted, an excellent partitioning utility, and many other great tools. You can also create a Windows Live CD that will run Windows XP from a CD using the PE (pre-installation environment). The advantage with Windows over Linux is that Windows has the native NTFS drivers so that reading and writing to the Windows NTFS file system is never a problem.

Favorite Live CDs

My favorite Live CDs or sometimes called Linux Distros are Slax, Insert, Knoppix, and Ubuntu. Slax can be easily customized with your favorite Open Source programs and become your personal PC Toolkit. Insert is a small, less than 100 megabytes, operating system that boots quickly and performs well. It also has all my favorite Open Source programs already installed. Knoppix is a very large and complete operating system on a bootable CD. It even has Open Office which is a free alternative to Microsoft Office. Ubuntu is one of the most popular Linux boot CDs or Live CDs. It has many easy to use features and is geared to the newer Linux user.

Bootable USB

Bootable USB flash drives have also become popular because of their ability to store files and configuration changes. They are also easy to create with DOS, Linux, or even Windows as a bootable operating system. I use these tools daily in my lab.

There is a site Live CDs that explains more about bootable CDs and how to create them. I also have created some YouTube videos that you might find useful on the subject.

Life's Good

Today my 30 lab computers are the least of my problems using these Live CDs, Boot CDs, and Bootable USB Drives that help me to keep them all running at their optimum.