Originally posted by sonhousei wouldn't buy it ... download it or look for a linux magazine with CD or DVD enclosed, at the local computer supermart. periodically the mags will have Knoppix. don't go redhat to start because it's not a live CD; you need to create new partitions and install redhat on the hard drive.
I didn't say I was going to buy it but it looks convenient. One thing that ticked me off, the site that offers this product has no phone line and you can only communicate via email. Personally I don't like to do business that way. I just wanted to ask some questions but will probably take a week to get a response. How much is the cd version?
Are you saying ...[text shortened]... t this product for free? If I could get one for free, I would not care if I had to use the CD.
www.distrowatch.com describes various linux distributions, with a popularity list (based on hits on their website). and links to downloads.
you could download knoppix and burn it to a CD as an image file, then boot with the CD. it will automount the Windows partitions and you can search them ('grep' is a Unix text search tool and 'find' is a Unix filetree/filename search tool.)
you could run f-prot or Clam AV on Linux to scan your Windows partitions for viruses, without Windows running. i don't if they catch spyware. if you are interested google for it or get the Linux Cookbook (maybe via interlibrary loan; it's pretty interesting).
knoppix is around 640MB, if you have dialup or you want to fit linux on a smaller jump drive you might download puppy linux (70MB?) or damn small linux (50MB?). i think the default damn small linux doesn't mount windows partitions by default, tho, so they wouldn't be readable unless you learn the unix commands to mount them. i think i read that puppy linux does do the automount.
knoppix should mount the windows partitions as read-only. you can change the FAT partitions to read-write but probably not XP/NTFS (last i saw, NTFS is not fully supported by linux since the filesystem details are not published). in any case, you should have a full backup x 2, windows recovery disks, etc.