One thing that Linux “LiveCDs” are good for is fixing/rescuing systems that won’t boot. Windows install hosed? Boot a Linux LiveCD and copy your data! Screwed up your boot loader and nothing will boot? Boot a Linux LiveCD and fix it.

One thing I find myself wanting occasionally, though, is to remotely get at the disk in a system. We have a few machines here protected with Norton that are very slow at disk access. The problem is that there’s no apparent reason for the slowness. One of my theories is that viruses or spyware could have gone unnoticed by the current antivirus software.

The problem is that you can’t have two anti-virus programs running at once. I learned this the hard way: they duke it out, and you end up with a system that won’t boot. And you really can’t uninstall Norton without jumping through hoops.

What I want, then, is a LiveCD that I can boot into, and have the system share each disk over Samba, so I can access them remotely. (Prompt for a passphrase before doing this so it’s not a glaring security vulnerability, of course.)

But then I was thinking… Mac OS X can apparently be booted into “target disk mode,” where the system basically pretends it’s a really expensive USB hard drive. You plug another computer into your Mac’s USB port in that mode, and just access it like it’s a hard drive. None of the partitions are ‘mounted’ by the OS, so you can do whatever you want to them. The disk is basically just a slave.

So I’m thinking that someone ought to make a distro that includes support for every filesystem it can, along with Samba, an FTP server, an NFS server, and “USB target disk” support. I don’t see why you couldn’t fit all of this on a single CD, along with a GUI. Because then I can just plop this in and do a ‘network’ virus scan, or do easy network backups. Or whatever else.

I’m kind of surprised this doesn’t exist, actually.