Having an "emegency rescue" CD is an important tool to have in your software collection. Sometimes it’s the difference between saving and not saving data in the event of a major screw-up in your OS or hard drive.

There are several rescue type products out there, but one worth looking at is called SystemRescueCd.

This utility makes admin tasks easy (there are many tools included) and also has the ability to creaty/edit partitions direct-on-disk.

This is actively updated software and not only supports standard file systems but network file systems as well.

Yes it is Linux based and yes it is free to acquire and use.

While it’s true you can use any Linux distro with a "Live" mode to recover data in the event of a crash, SystemRescueCd is specifically tailored for rescue functions to get to what needs to be done quickly.

Give it a try, you may like it.