What is Trinity Rescue Kit 3.0?
January 29, 2006
A. I first discussed this tool in the FAQ "What's the Trinity Rescue Kit?" . A new version is now available here, and you can find more information at http://trinityhome.org/trk. This new version is still a Linux-based recovery tool for Windows, but it has several new features including:
Read/write support on NTFS drives. The command "mountallfs" gives you read-only access to NTFS drives. Using the command with the -f option gives you safe, fast write access to NTFS drives, but you can create only 10 files per subdirectory, so it's not an ideal solution if you have to do many copies. Mountallfs -c gives you full write access, but you need to add ntfs.sys and ntoskrnl.exe from Windows XP Service Pack 1a (SP1a) manually, as the Usage Howto section of the Web site explains.
Simple password resets via winpass
Offline virus scans with two different antivirus tools (F-prot and ClamAv)
Registry editing
Partition editing with qtparted
NTFS file undelete functionality
Lots of hardware support, from most network cards and disk controllers to USB storage
Fast boot times (less than 40 seconds)
Network NTFS cloning
Remote administration possible
Network environment preconfigurable at boot
Integrated Web browser (links)
All this functionality is from a bootable CD-ROM; no information is written to the physical disk. For example, you can use the Winpass shell script, which uses a GNU Windows registry editor called Chntpw, to reset Windows passwords without having to know Linux. The script searches for any available local Windows installations, asks which installation you want to reset the password for, then starts Chntpw, as the figure shows. I recommend that you download and burn the utility to a CD-ROM and practice using it. It's a valuable tool for any power user or administrator.
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