Trinity Rescue Kit is a free command-line Live CD

Live CD

A live CD, live DVD, or live disc is a CD or DVD containing a bootable computer operating system. Live CDs are unique in that they have the ability to run a complete, modern operating system on a computer lacking mutable secondary storage, such as a hard disk drive...

 Linux distribution

Linux distribution

A Linux distribution is a member of the family of Unix-like operating systems built on top of the Linux kernel. Such distributions are operating systems including a large collection of software applications such as word processors, spreadsheets, media players, and database applications...

 created especially for rescuing Windows PCs It is aimed specifically at offline operations for Windows

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

 and Linux systems such as rescue, repair, password resets and disk cloning

Disk cloning

Disk cloning is the process of copying the contents of one computer hard disk to another disk or to an "image" file. Often, the contents of the first disk are written to an image file as an intermediate step, and the second disk is loaded with the contents of the image...

. It's virusscan encompases five antivirus programs.

Trinity Rescue Kit is bootable from a CD, USB media or a network using PXE

Preboot Execution Environment

The Preboot eXecution Environment is an environment to boot computers using a network interface independently of data storage devices or installed operating systems.PXE was introduced as part of the Wired for Management framework by Intel and is described in the specification The Preboot...

. Documentation for TRK exists both on the website, as well as in the console by using the command "trkhelp -l -t". Trinity Rescue Kit omits the standard Linux manual command

Manual page (Unix)

Man pages are the extensive documentation that comes preinstalled with almost all substantial Unix and Unix-like operating systems. The Unix command used to display them is man. Each page is a self-contained document.- Usage :...

 in order to conserve space. In addition, there are tools to migrate TRK from an ISO image

ISO image

An ISO image is an archive file of an optical disc, composed of the data contents of every written sector of an optical disc, including the optical disc file system...

 to a bootable USB device and vice versa.

Trinity Rescue Kit has a graphical startup menu based on SYSLINUX

SYSLINUX

The SYSLINUX Project is a suite of lightweight IBM PC MBR bootloaders for starting up computers with the Linux kernel. It is the work of H. Peter Anvin, and consists of several separate systems, the best-known of which is ISOLINUX.-List:...

 and vesamenu32 which is used to select boot options, but the OS is otherwise command-line only.

History

Starting in 2001, after creating a bootable DOS-based CD of proprietary software for offline operations (named "The Vault"), Belgian developer, Tom Kerremans decided to create a free bootable Linux CD.

The purpose would be to include free tools that could help rescue a Windows installation that was being problematic. Binaries and scripts from other distributions inspired the Trinity Rescue Kit. Sources included Mandriva

Mandriva

Mandriva S.A. is a publicly traded Linux and open source software company with its headquarters in Paris, France and development center in Curitiba, Brazil. Mandriva, S.A...

 2005 and the Fedora Cores 3 and 4. The startup procedure and methods, and many scripts, are custom-made for Trinity Rescue Kit.

Features

TRK 3.3 was based on Linux 2.6.26.

• 6 consoles (accessed using alt+F1, etc.)
• The ability to update itself (antivirus definitions/drivers) if burned onto a CD-RW
• Data Recovery Tools
• Clone Windows over a network
• Antivirus Scanner
  • ClamAV
  • F-Prot
  • AVG Anti-Virus
    AVG Anti-Virus
    AVG is a family of anti-virus and Internet security software for the Microsoft Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and FreeBSD computing platforms, developed by AVG Technologies, a privately held Czech company formerly known as Grisoft.- History :...
    
    
  • BitDefender
    BitDefender
    BitDefender is an antivirus software suite developed by Romania-based software company Softwin. It was launched in November 2001, and is currently in its 15 build version...
    
    
  • Avast
• Reset Windows passwords
• Read/Write to NTFS
  NTFS
  NTFS is the standard file system of Windows NT, including its later versions Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista, and Windows 7....
  
   partitions through ntfs-3g
  NTFS-3G
  NTFS-3G is an open source cross-platform implementation of the Microsoft Windows NTFS file system with read-write support. NTFS-3G often uses the FUSE file system interface, so it can run unmodified on many different operating systems. It is runnable on Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenSolaris, BeOS,...
  
  
  • clonentfs allows copying of all used space on a drive
  • Better support for Vista in build 321
• Edit partition layout
• SSH
  Secure Shell
  Secure Shell is a network protocol for secure data communication, remote shell services or command execution and other secure network services between two networked computers that it connects via a secure channel over an insecure network: a server and a client...
  
   Server
• Samba
  Samba (software)
  Samba is a free software re-implementation, originally developed by Andrew Tridgell, of the SMB/CIFS networking protocol. As of version 3, Samba provides file and print services for various Microsoft Windows clients and can integrate with a Windows Server domain, either as a Primary Domain...
  
   server
  • Share all local drives on network as a user or a guest
• Logical Volume Management
  Logical volume management
  In computer storage, logical volume management or LVM provides a method of allocating space on mass-storage devices that is more flexible than conventional partitioning schemes...
  
  
• Proxy server
  Proxy server
  In computer networks, a proxy server is a server that acts as an intermediary for requests from clients seeking resources from other servers. A client connects to the proxy server, requesting some service, such as a file, connection, web page, or other resource available from a different server...
  
  support
• Bridging Capabilities
  • Allows tcpdump when traffic passes other computers

External links

• Trinity Rescue Kit website