What's your favorite live CDs?

We've been doing some "spring cleaning" at work which has involved a lot of booting up computers to see what they they can do, things like finding out what hardware they have and what's on the hard drive. Those computers that are to be sent off for recycling the drives must be wiped of all sensitive data, I've found that Darik's Boot and Nuke (or DBAN) works well for this. For computers that won't boot up from the hard drive I've been just using an Ubuntu Linux live CD. There's been a couple situations where I've found one or the other lacking. I'm looking for live CDs that can do more.

One thing I'm looking for is a good live CD to do testing and partitioning of hard drives. Some times the builtin formatting tools on OS installers are not as easy to use or as feature filled as I'd like, it would be nice to have a live CD with good tools to do that. A live CD that has something that can test RAM would be nice too.

What live CDs do you use regularly? What are some you would suggest? I'm not just talking about live CDs that cover the issues I gave above but also some that do things that you've found useful for what you do. What are some live CDs that I should avoid? Sometimes software gets a better reputation than some people believe they deserve.

Live CDs I can download and burn myself are preferred but if there is some must have pay-ware out that is worth every penny then I'd like to hear about it too.

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Comments

jibbajabba

Can't go without gParted myself.

imagen taken from their website

darkerosxx

Why not make your own?

How to create and use a Live CD - FedoraProject

JasminLandry

I regularly use GParted as well. I also like Ultimate Boot CD - Overview for troubleshooting hardware issues.

jibbajabba

darkerosxx wrote: »

Why not make your own?

How to create and use a Live CD - FedoraProject

Why re-invent the wheel

darkerosxx

jibbajabba wrote: »

Why re-invent the wheel

Haha, I agree. I only mentioned in the case of OP getting a list of preferred apps and install them all on a self-made live cd.

RafaNoor91

The whole collection of Frank Zappa Live: "you can't do that on stage anymore"

paul78

darkerosxx wrote: »

Why not make your own?

How to create and use a Live CD - FedoraProject

I use a customized version of tomsrtbt which fits nicely on a floppy. I think tomsrtbt uses uclibc originally which I replaced with glibc.

But lately - I've started to use buildroot instead because no one seems to sell floppies these days. And I can put more stuff on a CD.

RomBUS

Hiren's Boot CD is my go to rescue CD. It has a bunch of diagnostic tools and even boots into a mini Windows XP environment for more advanced features

W Stewart

ultimate boot cd. It has pretty much anything you need for system recovery built into it. Behind that I would go with an arch install cd.