With the recent severe weather, a few of the folks in my neighborhood experienced issues with their computers after power failures. One neighbor suffered a corrupted hard disk and was left with an unbootable pile of metal, so she asked my wife if I would fix her system.

If you're like me, you probably keep a BartPE CD around for just such emergencies. I had intended to boot to the PE disc and run the handy chkdsk /f on the system hard drive. Unfortunately, my Bart Windows environment refused to recognize the filesystem on the drive, and things looked bleak for this old PC.

Enter Puppy Linux.

This little dog can really rock, and has come to my rescue on several occasions. Puppy Linux is a micro-distribution of Linux that can be booted from the CD. Because of its tiny footprint, however, it can be run completely in memory—you can boot the OS, then remove the CD and insert a Windows disk to replace system files or such. It can be booted from a flash drive if your computer supports it. It handles all the major Windows and Linux filesystems, and with GParted installed by default, you can resize and manage the partitions on just about any common hard disk.

Support for networking adapters is better than in the BartPE environment, and Puppy includes ndiswrapper for working with those pesky Windows-only wireless cards. This is all in a pleasant, useful graphical interface that doesn't wolf down all your RAM. "Small" and "functional" are the watchwords for Puppy Linux.

On my neighbor's computer, the graphical Puppy disk mounter attached to the system hard disk with no trouble (by default Puppy only mounts Linux swap partitions at boot time) and I was able to back up her important data before performing more drastic recovery measures. Life was good.

Puppy does provide a nice and simple package management system, and while the number of available packages is small, they're pretty easy to build, and likely some kind developer in the Puppy community will be happy to make one for you if you ask nicely. Several specialized Puppy derivatives have also been created, some for scientific work, office applications, and so on, but the goal is always to be small enough to run well, even on older hardware.

While many people use Puppy as their primary Linux distro, I personally wouldn't. I don't care for the single-user environment—everyone logs in as root. Still, this little dog has become an indispensable part of my troubleshooting and repair toolkit, and I wouldn't want to face a troubled PC without my faithful Puppy by my side.

Sometimes, it's a dog's life.