what is the best live cd to work on a badly infected XP system ?
 

what is the best live cd to work on a badly infected XP system ?
I need to do some serous work on a badly messed up XP system .
the live CD is just to recover data
with out the XP system disks there may be no way to fix it
so this may end up a slackware computer

Maybe Damn Small Linux, or puppy linux. I've just tried DSL.

I need one that can read the NT file system so it needs to have a fairly new kernel
as I remember the whole DSL distro is smaller than a fairly new kernel
the computer I need to work on is 3 years old so just about any live cd that can read the NT file system will work

Take a look at
http://trinityhome.org/Home/index.ph...=1&front_id=12

Have you considered BartPE, a Windows XP live CD?

Almost all of the Live distro's should have NTFS support.
Pick one you are familiar with.

I've done similar backup/repair jobs using Ubuntu 8.04 for recovering files, then BartPE with portable tools on a flash disk for repairing.

There are a number of linux live systems that you don't
even need to install on a cd
you can run them from a usb stick
I suggest you check out these (you can have all of them in the same stick):

slax
RIPlinux (RecoveryIsPossible)
partedmagic

slax is based on slackware and is very easy to configure
RIPlinux has a wealth of recovery tools
partedmagic has among other tools gparted

http://www.slax.org/
http://www.tux.org/pub/people/kent-r...looplinux/rip/
http://partedmagic.com/

I have all of these on a 4GB usb stick plus
grml (a debian type mainly console)
http://grml.org/