Back to the days I was fixing a lot of computers of friends and relatives, my Swiss army knife of Linux was www.system-rescue.org

Very lightweight but with a full set of recovery tools. I’ve tried it recently and I still find it up to the expectations.

I’ve also used a fair amount of clonezilla.org to (re)store images of freshly installed OSes (mostly windows XP and 7 to give you an idea of the timeframe) for people who I know would have messed up faster.