A coworker of mine accidentically destroyed his laptop filesystem with a Windows XP - Redhat dualboot. It booted into the Grub console, where it sat dead, as apparently Grub could not read its config file. The Linux filesystem was toasted, and eventually we used a Knoppix CD as a rescue system (very impressive !) to recover some of its files on the XP partition.




I allways used Tomsrtbt as a Linux emergency system, but as it has to fit on a floppy, it has rather harsh choices to make about the available programs. RIP Linux, which stands for Recovery Is Possible, is a nice bootable CD recovery Linux system with some fancy utilities to recover Linux and Windows files. Unfortunately, it doesn't contain Vim, but the rootfs can fairly easy updated with the binaries of your choice (that is, if you compile them onto it). A perfect Linux rescue CD, however, would be a crossing of RIP Linux and Debian, with a bunch of utilities to add your favourite programs. Which means I'm still having another look around for such a system.