AVG Technologies has announced that its Rescue CD is now available as a freeware utility to all customers.
The software, previously only available via the company's premium SMB products, is designed to recover compromised computers that are no longer able to boot or operate as intended.
The freeware utility, available to download onto a bootable CD or USB stick, is essentially a Linux-based boot utility armed with an arsenal of AVG security features.
Rescue CD provides AVG's comprehensive anti-virus and anti-malware scanning tools - useful if a severe virus infection has prevented your PC from booting - as well as a useful set of administration tools, including:
- 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 emergency boot utility is suitable for recovering both Windows and Linux operating systems - on drives formatted in either the FAT32 or NTFS file systems - and though the Rescue CD is aimed primarily at IT professionals and system administrators, it could be a useful tool for anyone who gets hit with a system-threatening infection.
The AVG Rescue CD is available for free at avg.com/us-en/avg-rescue-cd.
Press release: AVG Comes to the Rescue: Ships FREE Emergency Boot-up CD
