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March 11, 2005
BSOD recovery, iPod style
At InfoWorld, we've been using Apple's Disk Utility and Carbon Copy Cloner from Bombich Software to do system imaging and restores on our G5s and PowerBooks for some time now. Macs can boot from any attached drive, or even boot up and act as a FireWire drive for whatever machine you connect it to. This makes troubleshooting and system recovery a much easier process.
However, our methods of system recovery on our ThinkPads has been much less elegant. A combination of system restore CDs and online backups are used to get a system back up and running. The options for booting your Windows PC up in an emergency fix mode has been pretty limited. Safe Mode doesn't really do much.
Recently when I was fixing a crashed PC I used Knoppix Linux to get in and copy vital data from the system before starting to try to fix the system. Knoppix is a bootable Live CD which gives you a full Linux environment (including the ability to mount NTFS drives).
Amit Singh posted recently about his team at IBM Research developing some very cool software that allows for the booting of your PC from external devices, similar to the built-in functionality of Apple systems. The PC boots up a customized rescue Linux OS, similar to Knoppix, but also includes a number of business-related enhancements.
Travelling employees can keep one of these recovery images on their iPod or a USB drive, and in a pinch can boot the system up and have full Web, email, etc access until their system can be repaired.
For the IT folks, this provides a quick and easy way to boot up a PC and recover data, or fix a virus infection, without having to have Windows operational on the PC.
Besides... who could complain about a valid reason for buying iPods for your IT staff? =)
"Blue Screen of Death" Rescues With Personal Devices
Webcast demo (recovery demo is about 25 minutes in)
Posted by Kevin Railsback at March 11, 2005 11:07 AM
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