Linux Rescue Disks
Every now and then, Murphy screws up your computer.
Many Linux distros have their own version of rescue disks, but there are some other choices for you.
The LinuxCare BBC, http://www.linuxcare.com/bootable_cd/
A bootable CD the size of a business card, the Bootable Business Card packs a lot into a small package, including X11 if your video hardware supports a frame buffer. It contains a full complement of recovery and rescue software. On the disk are over 500 diagnostic programs, utilities, and networking clients. Difficult to customize in it's present form, the Lubbock Project is attempting to turn the BBC into a customizable distro,but the project seems moribund; development continues on the BBC.
This mini CD uses a 1.44MB boot image and therefore can be booted from a floppy if necessary. It will run on a 386 with 8MB ram.
Tomsrtbt, http://www.toms.net/rb/home.html
Claiming to be "The most Linux on one floppy disk", Tom certainly lives up to his claim. Using kernel 2.0.37, the distro can be customized by installing the base files and using Tom's build scripts. Network and SCSI support is available. Toms has now released an iso image to run tomsrtbt from a CD. Cool.
RamFloppy, http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/system/recovery/
Included scripts allow the creation of a boot floppy or the option of booting ramfloppy from a DOS hard drive. The latter is useful if you want to keep a set of Linux tools on an MS Windows box to do "repair" work. Based on kernel 2.2.18, it does not include support for SCSI devices or reiserfs.
RIP (Rescue is Possible), http://www.tux.org/pub/people/kent-robotti/looplinux/rip/
This rescue distro comes in both a floppy version and a bootable CD version (IDE CD-ROM drives only). This uses 2.4.0-prerelease-ac3 series kernel and supports reiserfs partitions but lacks network support features. You'll need at least a 486 and 8MB of ram to boot it.
The SuperRescueCD, http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~ichi/baslinux.html
Developed by H. Peter Anvin of loadlin.exe fame, this CD-based distro not only has all the Linux you need, but if you have a CD burner you can add programs and customize it. Using kernel 2.4, it can be run on a 486 or better computer with 64MB of ram and a bootable CD. It cannot be booted from a floppy because it uses a 2.88MB boot image (unless you have a 2.88MB floppy drive on the machine -- probably not). Memory requirements are heavy because it loads the system binaries into a ram disk to speed execution. Anvin includes a script to re-build the CD once you have made any modifications to it. This is the ultimate customizable rescue disk.
The Cool Tools That Make It Happen
Because many of theses projects attempt to use a floppy or mini-CD, they are limited as to what can physically fit on the media. The LinxCare BBC uses a closed-source image compression utility named cloop to pack more on the disk, and there are GPL compression schemes available. Many of these tiny distros typically make use of a program called busybox, a "toolkit" that mimics the actions of other GNU tools depending on how it's called. They also use snarf (a utility that includes some of the functionality of wget, curl, ncftp, lynx, and fetch) as an ftp client. And, tinylogin is frequently used although it does provide for handling logins, user authentication, changing passwords, and otherwise maintaining users and groups, it appears that some of the functionality can be left out to reduce size. For running X on boxes with as little as 4MB or ram, tinyX is useful; the full package includes a reduced version of xterm and a small window manager.
References:
If you need something special, like support for an unusual device, this tells you how to roll your own boot disk from scratch.
Someone may have already done the work for you.
On occasion, a little command here can save you a lot of trouble booting. Did you know you could use someone else's boot disk on your system?
When you see "LI ", it actually means something.
And here's how to fix it.
More stuff about LILO than you need to know. Where's the HOWTO for GRUB, though?
Linux ext2fs Undeletion mini-HOWTO
OOPS! Let's undelete that mission-critical file.
Linux ext2fs Undeletion of Directory Structures
Why stop with one file? Undelete a whole directory!
A must if you are doing recovery work.
A pale example of a good idea.
A Much Better Partition Rescue HOWTO, IMHO
It's . . . much better.
A Searchable interface to the man pages
Be lazy or find out stuff you didn't know.
A Searchable Link for the Linux Documentation Project
Useful because what you need is often times not where you think it is.
Search Google for Linux-Related Stuff
Talk to the Penguin.
The plain-Jane usenet search page.
Sometimes our desire to multi-boot can produce problems. Here's how to do it right.
Managing Multiple Operating Systems HOWTO
This has some good info on LILO configurations for multi-OS setups.
A tour-de-force of all filesystems. More than I wanted to know, anyways.
If you're trying to figure out where the problem lies in the boot process, it helps to know how it is supposed to work.
A source of useful goodies.
The Linux Network Administrator's Guide
We hear you say "You mean I have to set up networking by hand if I use a rescue disk?" Well, bubba, here's what you need to know. . .
And finally,
Using mkbootdisk in RedHat and derivatives to create a new bootdisk:
Copyright 2000/2001 by Hoyt Duff