Just released a HDD rescue LiveCD built with SUSE Studio!

Hey there fellow Linux enthusiasts,

you need to partition a disk or have to recover data from it but you don't have an operating system installed on your machine. So you grab a pen drive with your favourite Live Distro on it and boot it. But what's that? Gparted, Unison, Syncthing etc. are not installed?
Fear no more! With the help of SUSE Studio I have built a Live ISO that will likely please your needs. In addition to that it's so small that you can burn the ISO to a CD!
I'd love you to check out my ISO over at https://susestudio.com/a/OE1NZ6/hdd-rescue-livecd and leave some feedback here on this forum post. I'll make sure to include your suggestions in my next version.

With that out of the way let's talk about some issues release 1.0.0 has:

  • Autologin is not working: I've already added some custom config so that PAM allow lightdm to autologin, but for some reason it's broken
  • It's based on OpenSUSE 42.1: For some reason you can only select a 42.1 variant as your base image. That means this iso is using kernel version 4.1. Hence all fixes to BTRFS, EXT4 etc. are not included. (Please don't mount a BTRFS RAID 5/6 using this ISO)
  • Welcome screen or similar for newbies: I'd love to include a welcome screen for newbies or at least a website that offers some tutorials on how to do some stuff. But I have yet to customise Firefox for that purpose

If your favourite software package was not included with this ISO feel free to suggest it right here!

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Recently tested the ISO on a machine with a GTX 970. However couldn't get past LightDM. Might be related to an old nouveau driver.
Can anyone confirm this? And should I blacklist the nouveau driver then?

I will play around with this after work.

Depending on what my schedule looks like, I can also probably get a later version of opensuse to run.

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If you want to share it via torrent I'll seed it forever.

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Sounds good! But for now it's not worth it without any users and I have to update the ISO in a few days anyway.

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Any forensic tools like :

libluksde [ Library to access the Linux Unified Key Setup (LUKS) Disk Encryption format ]
reglookup [ Windows NT registry reader/lookup tool ]
regripper [ A Windows Registry data extraction and correlation tool ]
rifiuti [ Examine the contents of INFO2 in the Windows Recycle bin ]
scrounge-ntfs [ Data recovery program for NTFS file systems ]
libpff [ Library to to access the Personal Folder File (PFF) and the Offline Folder File (OFF) format. PFF is used in PAB (Personal Address Book), PST (Personal Storage Table) and OST (Offline Storage Table) files
salpel [ carver that reads a database of header and footer definitions and extracts matching files from a set of image files or raw device files. ]

Fun to use and helpful, very small size programs as well but there are many more...

Can you boot in Legacy/Troubleshooting mode?

I will also seed forever

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You got NTFS support in there. I have some windows folders from an exprimary drive that widows will not let me delete with in windows even though they are not used any more. Need to nuke them from the outside.

I'm working on including your tools. Unfortunately pretty much none of them have rpms. I guess I'll have to build them in the post-build environment.

The project page says that it's still experimental, so I'll wait for the first full release. But I'll include in the next version libpff, reglookup, scalpel and scrounge-ntfs for now. Regripper's build process looks like it will cause a lot of pain https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-install-regripper-registry-data-extraction-tool-on-linux. Let's hope my script builds everything. If it works I'll release it as an update.

Nope. It says something about failing to detect all USB devices for some reason although my keyboard is working. Then after a few minutes it just reboots.
When I'm not in legacy mode I can use LightDM. However XFCE freezes up (mouse not moving) while it says that it's loading autostart applications. On that PC I have both an Intel and NVIDIA card activated (no Optimus).

Sure read and write should work fine.

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Nice one. Thanks. I will have to fire it up soon and get some of my drive space back.

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They should, they are a part of CERT-Forensics-Tools n the Fedora distro

ok added every tool you listed except for regripper. had to add the centos7 repo and regripper has broken dependencies.

new release is out. so please check it out and give some feedback. thanks.

CERT-Forensics-Tools

If you are ever bored... Have a look. some pretty cool tools there.

I will ! Thanks

1 Like