F-Secure Rescue CD

F-Secure Rescue CD is a freeware distribution of Linux based on the Fedora or Red Hat operating systems, and built around the award-winning F-Secure anti-virus software. As its name suggests, it can be used as a rescue CD to clean infected operating systems, recover lost data from damaged partitions and rescue broken OSes that are no longer bootable.

Availability and supported platforms

The F-Secure Rescue CD product is available for download as a minimal, dual-arch Live CD ISO image that has been designed to support both 64-bit (x86_64) and 32-bit (i386) computers.

The ISO image has only 140MB in size and must be burned onto a CD disc using any CD/DVD burning software or written on a USB flash drive of 512MB or higher capacity in order to boot it from the BIOS of a PC.

Boot options

When booting the ISO image, the user will encounter a boot screen from where he or she can wait 15 seconds for the system to boot normally or just press the Enter key on their keyboard to start the rescue CD.

You can view a help menu by pressing the F2 key. From there, you’ll learn how to add extra kernel parameters in case the default boot option doesn’t recognizes some of the hardware components of the computer where you boot F-Secure Rescue CD.

Scanning your computer for malware was never easier

Once you boot the Live CD, it will display a text-mode interface from where you can start the actual virus scanning process. The software scans all the files and renames those that contain malware with the .virus file extension.

Bottom line

Summing up, F-Secure Rescue CD is a great rescue CD from the powerful and trusted F-Secure company. It can be used to scan hard disk drives, solid state drives, USB flash drives, as well as Windows FAT and NTFS drives.

What is new in this release:

• Enhanced hardware support: Knoppix updated to version 6.7.1
• Ask for http proxy address
• Able to boot from USB stick

What is new in version 3.0 Build 12506:

• New F-Secure Security Platform version
• New Knoppix
• USB stick improvements:
• Ability to speed up the process by storing malware definitions on a USB stick if scan is done often
• Ability to automate scanning or enable malware definition download behind a proxy
• Ability to run personalized automated script for the system as part of the process
• Ability to convert RescueCD into bootable USB stick
• Two new useful utilities have been added:
• PhotoRec is a tool that can be used to recover data that has been accidentally deleted or lost due to a corrupted file system on a disk.
• TestDisk is another data recovery tool that can, for example, be used to recover a lost partition.