I may be forced to purchase Windows for daughter to practice on,since shes lost only ever having used linux & her school doesn't use Linux nor LibreOffice.

Thought that might be an excuse to wreck & revive it.There's loads of cd disks grub rescue & such but then I read Alien Bob blog

https://alien.slackbook.org/blog/sla...-live-edition/ got

slackware64-live-xfce-current.iso from http://bear.alienbase.nl/mirrors/slackware-live/1.1.9.3 up & running on a usb.

So for computers that can boot from usb & it enabled in bios thought could be alternative for rescue tool.

I have clamav installed & freshclam working also ms-sys & testdisk ; haven't checked if gparted is on as default but what other tools would you put on useful for fixing & analysis for windows?

I highly recommend Hirens Boot CD since it has both a Win 7 environment and a Linux environment as well as a huge treasure box of tools, including GParted. One can easily pull tools from Hirens or use it as is. The version I've been using for a few years is 15.2 which still has some DOS tools run in a FreeDOS environment but I suspect thoise will likely disappear in later versions. Don't let anyone dissuade you crying about "piracy" which was deserved before v 10 but since has been completely legal. They do offer some "grey market" versions but the normal release is legal and awesome.

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Well, that XFCE ISO (timestamped 22 Nov) was broken. In particular, the 'ip' tool and xfce4-terminal were missing libraries.
I fixed that by adding a couple of packages and re-uploaded fixed XFCE ISO's (timestamped 23 Nov) to
http://bear.alienbase.nl/mirrors/slackware-live/1.1.9.3. You might want to grab and burn that.

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If its Windows 10 I recommend getting the iso file (requires Linux/Mac to get strangely enough):
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/soft...d/windows10ISO

This is so you can fix boot issues with it's command prompt: https://neosmart.net/wiki/fix-uefi-boot/

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cheers

@enorbet well i was really thinking what more could be added to Slackware live to make it useful for fixing & just have maybe two usb in pocket the boot up for Slackware Slackware & Live, but will have a look at Hirens Boot CD cheers

@Alien I only got one issue which was trying to build clamav line 116 something issue patch. Lazy use of http://www.slakfinder.org for clamav, ms-sys & testdisk install seems ok. Clamav seems to have old style /etc/clamav.conf
makes sense to go for fixed iso though

@radicalDreamer I haven't confirmed with school what version of Windows they are using think its 10 but i'm familiar with slackware so would like to stick to it. I guess dosfsck would be another tool.Not sure which way to go either with windows; go for a second hand unit Windows already installed hoping to get issues to play with, or brand new serial ATA hard-drive put on Windows & have dual boot 2 drives . I've just put grub 2 on swithing from lilo on my slack box to try. #update-grub isn't recognized so assume its grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg after adding 2nd drive.

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If the boot system is UEFI Windows 10 will occasionally make a mess of it, such as writing over the boot loader with its own. Then it decides its not going to boot Windows which requires fixing BCD as shown in the link I posted above.

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The 'update-grub' command is nothing but a 'stub' used primarily by the Ubuntu's and all it does is run the grub-mkconfig script, if you have any of the Ubuntu's you can look at it and see that it is just a one line script located at /usr/sbin/update-grub so you are correct in needing to run the grub-mkconfig command.

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@ Captain Sensible - Just in case, since i don't know you and your experience and skills, DO YOUR HOMEWORK! the tools on Hirens are deep level tools and by no means playthings. Bricks are quite possible so to quote Disney's Davy Crockett "Be sure you're right, then go ahead"... and rely on good backups.

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