Trinity Rescue Kit

Trinity Rescue Kit, also known as TRK among connoisseurs, is an open source and free bootable Live CD Linux distribution that can be used for offline system rescuing operations on both Linux and Microsoft Windows operating systems. It has no graphical desktop environment and requires a bare minimum of knowledge about Linux systems.

Distributed as Live CDs or EXE files

While the operating system can be downloaded from Softoware or from its official website (see link above) as a minimal ISO image that can be written to either CD discs or USB flash drives in order to boot it from the BIOS of a PC, it can also distributed as a self burning EXE file, offering an alternative for burning the ISO image on a CD disc or USB thumb drive under the Microsoft Windows operating system without much hassle.

A plethora of boot options

The main attraction of a system rescue CD is, of course, the boot menu of the Live CD. In Trinity Rescue Kit we can find over 20 boot options, such as the to run the live environment with default options, in failsafe mode, from RAM, in simple VGA mode, with Belgian keyboard support, with support or more PCMCIA, SCSI and USB NICs, without ACPI, in single user mode or using the debugging mode (verbose startup).

Additionally, it is possible to scan all of your computer’s disk drives for viruses, execute the mclone utility in client mode for easy creation and distribution of hard disk drive images over the network using multicast, enable a SSH (Secure Shell) server, set all devices as read-only, enable proxy server support or run the operating system as a bootserver for booting other TRK clients.

Bottom line

Summing up, Trinity Rescue Kit can help you rescue data, repair an unbootable system, recover lost password, as well as to clone a disk drive. It features custom utilities for recovering deleted files, perform antivirus sweeps, clone Windows installations over the network, and much more.

What is new in this release:

• rebuilt kernel 2.6.35 with ata_generic support (for Mac Mini 4,1?)
• updated local documentation with latest webversion
• added latest pi + manpage
• modified network scripts to also bring up usb nics (e.g. called usb0)
• display command executed in the menu