Malware is relentless, buggy drivers are everywhere, and the recovery features in the newest Windows versions are still very weak. Being locked out of your operating system is one of the worst situations an average user can face, but at least there are several tools that can get us out of trouble. One of them is Trinity Rescue Kit, a mini Linux distro loaded with antivirus, temporary file cleaners, and an NTFS mounting system.
When Windows crashes
A problem has occurred on your PC and it needs to restart. Few things are as frightening as that message. Sometimes we can fix it fairly easily: temperature problems, excessive overclocking, or an unstable driver can make Windows fall apart, but those are just three factors. Malware infections, an update stuck halfway, real hardware failures (say, hard drive, RAM, or power supply), or very old programs can cause a blue screen, or even worse, that Windows will not start. Granted, Microsoft offers several resources for recovering the operating system, but we also know their effectiveness is limited.
There are times when we are forced to work around Windows, and recently we looked closely at the Dr. Web LiveDisk environment, but today I want to add Trinity Rescue Kit to our arsenal. As its name suggests, Trinity Rescue Kit lets us run certain repair and rescue functions, starting by "reset" the Windows password, mounting all detected partitions for modification (or individual file extraction), antivirus scanning with five available engines, cleaning temporary files, purging recycle bins and the print queue, and running the classic Midnight Commander with NTFS access.
Trinity Rescue Kit has a few years under its belt, which leads me to a recommendation: don't waste time with the stable version. The last update for that build dates back to April 2011, and it's only useful on older computers. The project leader released the "beta 397" in October 2016, which brings more polished hardware support and a new kernel. The ISO image size barely exceeds 180 megabytes, so you shouldn't have any problem copying its content to a USB drive with Rufus or something similar.
