I have a dream…

Posted on August 19, 2006 One Comment

Ok, here’s what I’m looking for. I’m sure it must exist, please feel free to leave comments!

Prelude

From time to time I take on side jobs that aren’t development related at all. Instead, they are the kind of job best described as “OMG our PC runs really really slow please make it better!” The machines are usually several years old and often just totally loaded up with spyware and malware. Some times a few viruses as well. These I can usually clean up/disinfect and turn ‘em around pretty quick just by using some of my “toolkit” items.

Other times, the machine will be so loaded with viruses and crap that I’ll make the decision that we’re better off doing a complete wipe and restore. Too many viruses, too much crap, the install of the OS is too old or whatever. Just quicker and cheaper for the customer to let me tear it down and rebuild it.

I cringe everytime I plug in my USB drive to a machine like that.

Fortunately, after the reload I get some antivirus on there right away, so that when I copy the backups from the USB back to their machine everything gets scanned. And until that point, I just don’t use the USB drive for anything else. Simple paranoia.

The Actual Dream

Wouldn’t it be cool if I had a boot CD that ran a small OS of some sort? And that boot CD had simple utilities to mount internal Fat32 and NTFS volumes and external USB drives? Automatically? Boy, that’d make some of the backing up exercises neat and safe. I’m not envisioning one of the large do-everything-from-one-boot-CD things, just a nice small and fast utility. Or extra points if it boots from USB (something I need to figure out some day).

Is there such a beast? Would it be a major pain in the rear to customize some other boot thingy to do this?

Tags: antivirus, backup, boot-CD, security, services