Live CDs (or USBs, floppies et al)

Is anyone aware of a live CD that boots one into the PCs OS? (XP Pro in my case)

If I'm understanding them, they all are stand-alone OS (which is most excellent all by itself...) that solely access (but don't run) the PC's programs/files....

(This is all new and confusing to me!)

Thank you.

 

Right, a Live Boot CD runs a stripped version of the OS (in the case of BartPE) that is not running off the hard drive, but you can access & manulipate files on the hard drive.

The Winternals (now M$) EmergencyRecoveryDisk mounts the registry and allows you to run system restore, but it does not allow you to run installed software from the hard drive either.

The live CDs based on M$ are susally used to correct some trouble you have booting into your real OS. Not to run as a 'full' operating system.

The Linux live CDS are more a demo of the OS, so you can run it before installing to the hard drive, but they can be used to fix Windows problems also.