My lovely 1TB Seagate FreeAgent USB drive just went to the grave, and so I've backed up my ext3 and NTFS partitions onto my laptop and left that poor drive to atrophy.

That said, the drive contained a daily-use Mint Linux, but due to the drive failure, I'm forced to stick with this mediocre Windows Vista that came pre-installed on the laptop.

What is a good Linux distro that I could quickly install and use on a flash drive? I'd like to go back to Linux to feel the speed of my laptop again... (Keep in mind that flash drives typically have slow I/O, so perhaps something less I/O intensive?) A Linux distro with XFCE/GNOME is preferred.

Finally, I would like to retrieve some files from my partition backups. I used PartImage to perform the backups, but they say that retrieving files from the backup is "impossible"... but I think it's possible, but only in a crude way. Any suggestions on how that could be done? I'm thinking about using TestDisk to grab the files out, since both PartImage and TestDisk work with low-level blocks (but PartImage only takes the used blocks, hence how I was able to dump "1TB" -> 25 GB.).

If you have a raw backup like a .img file, you could mount it using 'mount -o loop backup.img /mnt' and get your files from that. For a Linux distro, I personally like Crunchbang Linux; you can get either the XFCE or Openbox version.

Hmm... was very close to grabbing it until I saw two things:

1) BitTorrent - icky, don't really want to grab a client just to download that Then again, I do have a client on my USB drive... this really isn't a deal breaker though. The deal breaker is the 2nd thing...

2) This disclaimer: "CrunchBang Linux is not recommended for anyone needing a stable system or anyone who is not comfortable running into occasional, even frequent breakage."

I thought they were basing their OS on Debian Stable (Squeeze)? I have no time to hack or fix the OS. I just want something that works and that I can work with everyday without having any worries about the OS falling apart.

It's also interesting to note that their Openbox version is bigger than their XFCE4 version...

Not as easy as that - since the image takes only the used blocks of ext3, the filesystem may be in a rather scattered array...

What I've gathered after quite a bit of reckless searching (unfortunately, there's no single solution), I get the following:
1) Some obscure VirtualBox way (not doing that) OR
2) The following steps:

(Source: http://home.prea.net/node/107, http://www.coolacid.net/20080908134/Latest/restore-a-partimage-backup-to-loopback, and http://www.partimage.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=2587&sid=38680620fd6f012d12711ac1dedb68fc#2587)

Unfortunately, it seems both require plenty of disk space to use... which I'd like to avoid.

To stick up for #!, I don't think I've ever heard Souvik saying that it has crashed, except for cases where he runs out of RAM (which happens, when you have 512 MB). I think that is more of a spin on the "I am not responsible for what happens from this program" thing that most programs throw out there. Do you mean BitTorrent only, or any torrent client? I don't think they can restrict it to only BitTorrent, though I could be wrong.

use ubuntu its quick and easy thats what i use when i'm not running my minecraft server. and if you like it... oh wait mint is ubuntu. tehe silly me

then try slax

Fixed:

Albert: I believe there is a direct download option, there was one the last time I visited that site.

Spud, Ubuntu is a great option, but it's gotten far too heavy to be a good USB stick option unless you have the free space for it...

Puppy Linux is also quite good for a live USB Linux distribution, since it loads everything into RAM after booting.