Best distro for Rescue PC

Operating Systems & Open Source Linux
1

Okay so I have got my hands on a grubby PC that will be used for Windows rescues, its a Pentium 4 and 1GB RAM, so naturally Linux will be put on this, and it will be a focused PC, for stuff like Drive clones, Password breaking, Virus removal etc etc, what you would find in your standard PC shop, except they use Windows to fix a problem Windows caused...

What distro would you recommend for this? I feel a live distro is too slow, so having a distro I can run on an actual PC and USB satas drives into the PC would help.

Also would KVM/VB work here? like for live versions of Windows, So I can make a VM of that drive? is this possible? 

 

I am currently thinking Cent OS as I feel a stable distro would be much better over Bleeding edge, but if you agree otherwise please give me your reasons, I just feel stable would allow less DT than Bleeding edge.

 

Thanks!

2

CentOS is a good choice certainly. Probably Debian is an even better one. Well supported and the stable version is basically immortal. And if you are using it for password breaking and such you might also wanna see if you can install Kali (old BackTrack) Linux. 

3

http://www.sysresccd.org

Gentoo based.

4

i'll second the debian recommendation. also for x11, xfce or openbox. crunchbang runs very well on older hardware.

kvm prefers hardware support and without it will be painfully slow. i would not worry about virt on the fixit machine. i would use things like dosfstools for thumb drive support, ntfs-3g for mounting ntfs drives, clamav for anti-virus and clonezilla and possibly dd for copying drives.

5

You could use kali since it has most of the software you want out of the box.