I personally always have one USB stick with me that has a live usb boot of Fedoraon it, but I just saw the new video from Linus tech tips and thought about extending it a bit.
He mostly talked about windows tools, but I think I will add
- https://www.ventoy.net/en/download.html for maybe an additional Linux light version
- https://github.com/TheWaWaR/simple-http-server if I have to share files from a broken Computer or so.
What are you using or do you have recommendations?
Hiren’s boot CD
It’s a small ISO with tons of utilities on it. It’s great for recovering data if shit goes really south. I always have one handy.
Edit: toss it onto your ventoy stick
I use the new PE version since it’s still maintained and has had something to fix any of my problems so far.
I used to carry Tails around on a tiny USB drive in case I wanted to do something on an untrusted machine, but a) the USB device I chose got stupidly hot, and b) I never actually needed to use it since I carry a smartphone everywhere, so I stopped.
Is having an OS boot on a USB really all that useful? Serious question.
Maybe not the same, but a knoppix CD was part of my toolkit for field work for many years. Stuff I did with it:
- Retrieve or fix data from systems that could not boot.
- Scan systems infected with boot viruses (clamscan), and wipe entire drives if necessary
- Test various network issues: DHCP, DNS, tcpdump, and so on because Windows tools were pretty bad for a while
- Bypass various Windows restrictions on user’s systems
Definitely, besides playing around with it and booting it on random Laptops, I revived two notebooks on the go. One had a broken windows install(somehow the main C drive nuked itself into 8 separate partitions) and she was still running Linux 1 month after that so I guess a win, and the other windows “Laptop” was super laggy(3-4 Gib of ram), but I granted the machine another two solid years(one time laptop run out of power during an big update, rest was great).
An adapter that turns my laptop into a KVM. Also a foldable wireless keyboard. I used to carry a travel router that would VPN me home.
Not OP, but I carry one from Star Tech. They are pricey, but if you need them, the are great.ine also has mass media support, so I can use a iso on my pc and boot the other computer to it, great for setting up servers when ilo/idrac decides to give you issues.
Yea I use one from Startech.
https://www.startech.com/en-us/server-management/notecons01
My job takes me to a lot of random environments I’ve never been to before. This thing is a life saver.
I didn’t realize you can have an OS ISO and other programs on the same USB stick. I thought the live boot ISO had to be the only thing on the stick (or multiple ISOs using Ventoy).
With Ventoy you can have additional files on the same partition. However Ventoy scans everything on that partition, so additional files can slow it down. I recommend creating a directory, say named “Files” and put an empty file “.ventoyignore” into it which makes Ventoy ignore that directory and all sub-directories.
No reason you can’t also have a data partition on the drive, provided your drive is big enough.
I looking into buying the usb-c 3.2 gen2 from Kingston with up to 1000/900 read write speed and the minimum is 256GiB so space is no issue.
Yeah I have some decently speedy USB-A 3.0 drives, they’re essential to me these days. Although I’ve filled them with too much crap to use as a boot drive for anything lol. They’re only 400MBps, but weren’t expensive.
One thing I’ve noticed though, it ends up saturating a pair of USB ports in a lot of computers. If I have a second thing in an adjacent port, eg a mouse, things get screwy (mouse movement gets choppy or speeds throttle).
