Hi all,

Here's what I want to find:

A distro that can be installed on a pen drive (USB key) which will allow me to:

-transfer data from an externally connected Windows HDD to an internally connected Windows HDD
-create a log (on the USB key) of files transferred

Bonus if:
-the software used for the transfer (rsync?) has a graphical front end which lets a user easily select directories for backup to the internal drive (eg via tickboxes)

In essence, this is three questions:
1)Good pen drive distro?
2)Good, easily automatable tool for transfering files between two Windows formatted HDDs?
3)Accessible graphical front end for said tool? Or recommendations for developing one?

Many thanks guys!

Boot from a flash drive and accessing NTFS volumes is simple enough, pretty much any modern distribution could do that for you. I would personally suggest something lightweight and flexible like Arch, Slackware, or Debian. But it is hard to beat the userbase and documentation of something like Ubuntu.

As for an easy to use GUI for syncing two local filesystems, I can't think of any off the top of my head. Perhaps somebody could chime in on that one.

Try DSL which may be perfect. As for the rest, they have a pretty good repository. Frankly however, you may have to "roll your own"