Any self respecting geek should have the following in his backpack/laptop bag:
A Knoppix CD – Knoppix is probably the best diagnostics/recovery tool ever. I can’t tell you how many times I resurrected dead windows machines using good ol’ Knop. In most cases all you really need to do is to boot some operating system on the machine, and then mount the HD and back all the data up. Your best bet is an external HD, or a network share. If you don’t have neither of those, you can try booting with the tohd or toram parameters so that you can free up your CD-R drive for burning.
The Ultimate Boot CD – a collection of diagnostic tools, and Dos boot disks. Sometimes these tools come very useful. The other day I had to bring back to life an ancient Win98 machine. The thing refused to boot from the Win98 CD. I only other windows disks I had at home were all Dell OEM 2k and XP versions which are locked up. So I ended up booting the system off of UltimateBootCD in a DOS compatible mode and then I could run the Win98 installation manually.
System Rescue CD – I use this one mainly because it includes QtParted which is by far the best free partitioning program I have used. It also has some other nifty features, but I rarely use them. In fact, GParted Live may be a viable replacement for this.
DSL Linux or Trinity Rescue Kit are great live distros if for some reason you can’t run a fully fledged Knoppix (for example, not enough RAM). DSL uses a lightweight GUI (iceWM + BlackBox if I remember correctly) while Trinity is command line based (and has captive ntfs support). Both have saved my life on more than one occasion.
Knoppix STD -this final entry is optional, but I like to carry it around. STD is a Knoppix clone with some nifty security related tools. For example, there is are tools there that let’s you reset windows passwords when your users forget them. Note that it is not the easiest distro to use, but you can usually find really good step-by-step walkthroughs for stuff like cracking passwords and etc…
Update Fri Jun 2 10:48:59 EDT 2006
I forgot to add one thing, and Zewrestler aptly mentioned that in comments. No geek is complete without a screwdriver. I personally like the Husky’s with the rotating handle, but then again your millage may vary. I added a picture of my toolkit above.
Yes, I know all my screwdrivers are small but I usually work on Laptops, and occasionally some desktops. I haven’t needed any heavy duty tools in like forever.
Thats good for software, but you can’t forget the importance of a screwdriver.
Yup, very true. I edited the post to include that, and added a picture :)