There are a couple of Linux distros I use regularly for such activities as creating recovery images of developer machines and communications debugging. To avoid software installation on production systems I simply run these distros from a bootable thumb drive created with the help of a very useful tool called YUMI.
YUMI automates the installation of a number of supported distros onto the one thumb drive using a simple GUI. Once the distros are installed I simply create a folder on the thumb drive called "Data" and keep any docs etc that I need in there the same as I would on any other thumb drive.