AVG Rescue CD

I recall a day, not too long ago, that there used to be a fair number of “rescue” tools out and about on the market.

My preferred go to tool of the day was FProt.

These days I didn’t know of one until AVG (yes, them of the free Anti Virus) released their latest product – the AVG Rescue CD.

But what does a ‘rescue CD’ do? In simple terms it is a stand alone, self-booting CD (or USB stick) that contains Anti Virus, Anti Malware and more besides. AVG have gone a step further though and added a few extra tools into it to make a truly versatile product.

In their words:

The AVG Rescue CD is essentially a portable version of AVG Anti-Virus supplied through Linux distribution. It can be used in the form of a bootable CD or bootable USB flash drive to recover your computer when the system cannot be loaded normally, such as after an extensive or deep-rooted virus infection. In short, the AVG Rescue CD enables you to fully remove infections from an otherwise inoperable PC and render the system bootable again.

Apart from the usual AVG functions (malware detection and removal, updates from internet or external device, etc.), the AVG Rescue CD also contains the following set of administration tools:

• Midnight Commander – a two-panel file manager
• Windows Registry Editor– simple registry editor for more experienced users
• TestDisk – powerful hard drive recovery tool
• Ping – to test the availability of network resources (servers, domains, IP addresses)
• Common Linux programs and services– vi text editor, OpenSSH daemon, ntfsprogs etc

I’ll certainly be adding it to my repertoire of tools to take when I visit friends and relations that have infected machines.

What tools do you use?