Anti-virus software leaders, AVG Technologies have announced the AVG Rescue CD, which can be used to recover computers that are not able to boot or are infected in a way that will not allow normal operation. The Rescue CD available to all customers (including AVG Free customers) and can be downloaded to any CD or USB stick. It can then be inserted into the damaged computer and used as the recovery disk.

Upon booting a damaged computer using the Rescue CD, the software will automatically mount all hard drives of the computer and scan them for viruses and malware. It will also automatically restore a safe network connection to the computer.

In essence the Rescue CD is a Linux-based boot utility with all the usual AVG security software already integrated. However, apart from the usual AVG functions (malware detection and removal, updates from internet or external device, etc.), the AVG Rescue CD also contains the following set of administration tools for more advanced users:
Midnight Commander - a two-panel file manager
Windows Registry Editor– simple registry editor for more experienced users
TestDisk - powerful hard drive recovery tool
Ping - to test the availability of network resources (servers, domains, IP addresses)
Common Linux programs and services– vi text editor, OpenSSH daemon, ntfsprogs etc
The AVG Rescue CD can be downloaded for free from AVG’s website at http://www.avg.com/in-en/avg-rescue-cd  and burned onto any CD or DVD or extracted directly onto a USB flash drive.

The AVG tool will be very useful for  episodes where boot failure is because of  virus or other malware infection.  But one must be realistic: there could be other causes --  for which only the original OS software provider  has to provide the remedy -- if at all.

March 25 2010