Last week we learned how to rescue a failing hard drive by copying files to a second local hard drive. You can also copy files over the network, which is useful for nearly any problem, whether it's software or hardware. You need a second PC running sshd. Suppose the second PC is named filestore. Boot SystemRescueCD on the sick computer, then use the scp command to copy your important files

SLAX is a minuscule version of the well-known Slackware Linux distribution. It is a LiveCD operating system that does not need to be installed on a computer’s hard drive as it can boot and run from either a USB or a CD drive. There is also an option to run SLAX from RAM. It is now time to take a microscopic look at this tiny distro. But first, some SLAX facts...

If you want to add more storage to your machine by adding a new hard drive,and you have already a linux system installed in the first hard drive, then just follow this tutorial.

...one of the computers ran out of hard drive space. So I had a bigger hard drive with four times the disk space handy, and swapped them. The steps:

There are many options with USB Flash drives now. Here is a tutorial on how to install Damn Small Linux on a Pen Drive. This is version 4.4.7, the newest version. Plugin your Pen Drive in to the USB slot. For DSL it is a great one to experiment with because you can use a small Pen Drive to work with. A 256 MB Pen Drive allows you a lot of space since the operating system is only 50 MB.

This weekend I suffered a meltdown of my workstation’s main hard drive. The drive help my Windows Vista Ultimate install, which in turn held several hundred pictures, music files, movies etc., not to mention all the games and utilities that I had installed over the years.

I can get a half-tetrabyte drive for under $100 retail (and around $60 online) seems just short of amazing. It was just such an opportunity that helped me decide to pop into the local big-box store and grab such a drive.

"This week's release of the Fedora 9 Linux distribution makes putting a full-fledged desktop on a portable USB thumb drive a three-click affair. Even better, you don't need Linux installed to create it, you can leave the data on your thumb drive untouched, and any files you create or settings you tweak remain in place the next time you boot up."

Everybody who owns a computer will someday need to dispose of a disk drive. Before you do, it is a good idea to cleanse the drive, so no one can read your sensitive information. Deleting files and reformatting is not sufficient; determined effort can still reveal data from a drive even after it appears to be gone.