Building a mint machine for a repair shop

[AK89]

Hey,

I'm somewhat new to linux but I've been reading and learning about it for a couple of months now. I work at a pc shop and we are trying to setup a linux machine that could help us with diagnosing hard drives and doing virus cleanups on windows hard drives that are hooked up to it. We used to do all that without a problem when this machine used to have windows xp. Eventually it crashed on us but we still relied on it with LiveCDs such as clonezilla and gparted.

Basically I need troubleshooting programs and data recovery programs that can run on mint or through wine and antivirus, spyware and malware programs that can scan external windows drives. I have been able to get HDSentinel working which shows the health of hard drives but still need some removal programs.

Or will linux ultimately give me more headaches trying to do something like this?

(still got mint on my home laptop and im lovin it )

[garda]

ClamAV can detect and remove a number of malware, but I don't think it can fix broken registry entries/database caused by malware, at least not from Linux. AVG, Avast! and Panda also have Linux version. I have no intensive experience with any of them (last time I dealt with Windows virus infection was in 2000), so can't comment.

TestDisk is a very good data recovery utility that runs circles around most commercial offerings.

If you can be more specific on the type of programs you need ('recovery programs' is too broad of a term), you most likely will get better answers.

[AK89]

thanks for the fast reply garda,

with recovery programs i meant something like acronis that will try to recover deleted files from a hd that was formatted or just deleted in the past.
thanks for the suggestions i didnt know there was avast for linux, ill look into it.

[Aging Technogeek]

There is a linux program (actually it is more like an Operating system ) that is specifically designed for the type of things you are doing. It's called Parted Magic. Check out their website. to see if it could be useful to you.

Another good resource is System Rescue CD here.

You might also be interested in the Ultimate Boot CD here.

Of course Gparted and Gpart are both available from Package manager in Mint and Ubuntu.

[vincent]

You might want to take a look at AVG Rescue CD...basically AVG took a Linux distro and then added their own tools on top of it. Also has a registry editor and Testdisk. http://www.avg.com/ie-en/avg-rescue-cd

[AK89]

Thanks everyone, think I found everything I needed