In this post a collection of useful tools which can be used in PXE is introduced.
Parted Magic:
… is a realy cool tool for system rescue, backup or just for altering partition settings on an already installed system. If you want to alter system partitions like a seperated /var-partition on linux systems it could be tricky because at runtime, the system is using the /var-partition for logs, or pid-files and so on. The easiest way for me is to boot the system with parted magic and alter the partition table from within the livesystem which is started by parted magic.
Parted magic itself was free for a long time, but since August 2013 ~10$ have to be payed to download the software from the authors website. If you don’t want to pay the 10$ there are a lot of older releases of Parted Magic (which are free) on the internet. You will find a download whithin 5 mins ;).
There are no extra PXE-files for Parted Magic, but it can be started easily with memdisk from PXE.
The official site can be found at partedmagic.com
Clonezilla:
… is a nice tool for disk imaging and backups. There is also a Version of Clonezilla included in Parted Magic so it’s not realy necessary to include a seperate Clonezilla instance in you PXE-Menu if you are already using Parted Magic.
Clonezilla can be obtained from clonezilla.org and an introduction to setting up clonzilla for PXE-booting can be found on clonezilla.org/livepxe.php.
Plop Boot Manager
… is a great tool for booting devices from USB-sticks which are tricky to boot from USB. Whith Plob even devices which have no BIOS like embedded devices can be booted from USB-Drives. But it’s capable of a lot more – just check out the website at plop.at.
FreeDOS
… as the name says – a free DOS system. It can be used if you have to update the firmware of a BIOS, BMC, RAID-Controller or ainithing like that.
Memtest86+
… for testing if one of your memory modules has an error.
www.memtest.org
Ultimate Boot CD
… is – as the name says – the ultimate collection of tools for your system. It includes HW-diagnostic tools like AIDA16 (former open source Release of Everest System Benchmark Tool), BIOS, HDD, CPU, memory-tools and lots more. The full list of tools can be found here. Since some time there is also a version of Parted Magic included in the Boot CD – so in most cases – this single CD should do the job.
Download is available at www.ultimatebootcd.com
