Ubuntu. A simple boot download?
 

As per my thread about son's problems, I downloaded Ubuntu and burned it to CD. Is it me, or is it seriously fast on its version of Firefox? What's more, it rarely has to accesses the CD.

Anyway, that's by the way. What I got was a sizable lump of software which I found contained Open Office, and other goodies.

All I want is a basic OS and file manager of course. Nowt else. Does anyone have a link to such a paired down version?

Puppy Linux is one I know is fast, small, simple and reliable.

Another alternative is Hiren's Boot CD which has a shedload of utilities AND will let you boot into a "miniXP" file system complete with file manager, etc.



PS. Ubuntu would have been running so "fast" because it's sitting in a RAM drive and not running off the CD. That means the access times are faster.

You can put Hiren on a bootable USB stick which is what I have done and it is brilliant and VERY portable.

yeah, and the better thing is being able to choose which utils you want to put on the usb stick/boot cd so you have your own "personalised" boot stick/cd.

There are others out there like the Hiren boot CD, things like Ultimate Boot CD (as referred to in another post/thread), which are just as good. Things like that are a must-have for any PC user, they can pull you out of so much manure without having to format/reinstall/etc (but not all the time, of course).

Give this a go....amazing the size of it.
DSL information

Not Debian or Ubuntu based, but Gentoo, Simply Rescue CD is my tool of choice for recovering data and fixing boot problems. One of its tools is partimage which enables you to make an image of any disk or partition - which is what you should do before running any other fix-it tools. That way, should the tool not work and possibly have made things worse, you still have the original problem partion or disk to work with.

Another tool to use if you can get windows running but have lost data is PC File Inspector. That can recover files even if the directory or partition they were on has also been deleted - provided the disk space has not been subsequently overwritten.