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I am working on a computer that needs some work done it, but without clean wipe without recovering a few copies of doctoral dissertation (already talked to them about multiple storage locations). A boot off of a Windows 7 disc into repair mode does not work, which is a new one for me, it hangs for hours. So, I want to make a USB drive that is bootable, and allows a user to work off a command line, find a few files, and copy them over to the USB drive. And then allow some disk fix tools to run to check for bad sectors, etc. I am not well versed in Linux at all (never had the need or desire), but I was excellent at DOS 3, 5, and 6.xx. What would be a good tool that I can load up to a USB drive and hopefully salvage this work.

If I still had my desktop, I would simply plop it into there, and work like that, but alas, I don't have that option.

Hiren's Boot CD and System Rescue CD.

TheEmrys wrote:

I am not well versed in Linux at all (never had the need or desire), but I was excellent at DOS 3, 5, and 6.xx.

just remember DOS has the slashes the wrong way round

Seriously though you shouldn't need the command line to recover the documents, pretty much any live cd from a major distro should let you do that just using the gui. Checking the drive for errors would be a bit more tricky unless you just looked at the smart data for the drive which you can do with the "disks" utility in gnome distros (and ubuntu).