I recently had an old hard drive (circa 2000) that I had to do a data recovery on.  I looked at in under Windows with Forensic Toolkit.  I was not able to access the drive data at all.

 I then hooked it up to a different computer and booted into Puppy Linux.  I mounted the drive.  I was given a warning that it was being accessed as “read only” because the windows journaling system was broken.  It did allow access to all the data.

 I was able to access all the pictures and document files on the hard drive for recovery. It was definetly a big reinforcer for me to utilized Linux in data recovery operations.  (Especially my favorite Puppy Linux!)

There are a lot of old computers out there now.  If you are like me, you have struggled to keep them upgraded and useful.  But, alas there comes a time when it doesn’t seem like you can do much with the 2000 era computer.

The solution I came up with…. small linux distributions.  Two in particular: “Damn Small Linux” and “Puppy Linux.”  Theese are both exceptionally good. Both of the distros allow the user to create a bootable CD.  They are both less than 60 MB in size.  They load totally into memory. If you mainly want to surf the internet, since these distros load completly into memory; your computer will FLY. Yes, even on that old computer. If you have widely compatible hardware, “Damn Small Linux” boots fast and functions very well.  If your hardware needs some customized settings to work, Puppy has a very nice interactive boot routine that walks the user through eveything.

My mom is a very basic skilled computer user.  I love her to death, but she is still intimidated by using email. I set her up with a “Damn Small Linux” CD for her old computer.  With like 5 minutes of instruction, my mom now boots into Linux and surfs the net.  Not to mention, she loves how fast and trouble free her old computer runs.  If it is booted into Windows 98 off the hard drive, it is painfully slow.

So, if you have an old computer OR just a desire to try a simple Linux distro on a CD; give these a try!