"John Patton" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Does anyone know how one would go about creating a debian > rescue cd? Something bootable, with enough utilities on it > to really be able to fix a system. A custom made ramdisk > would be perfect. I've been trying to figure out how to do > this, with no luck. Any hints or pointers would be great. > Thanks.
I can tell you this, it ain't easy. I have such a CD that I created manually. What I did was simply make an ISO image of my running system and burn it to a CD-RW and try and boot from it. Each time I'd fix whatever problems it had in the original ISO image by mounting that image via a loop device and making the changes. One I remember is that I needed a writable /tmp and /var so I added the creation of a RAM disk(s) and mounted /var and /tmp onto the RAM disk at bootup. I did this by adding an appropriate script to /etc/init.d on my ISO image. Once I had it all going I burned a CD-R. I did NOT try to make the CD-ROM bootable, rather I used and told LILO to install itself on that floppy, with a "Boot Rescue CD" selection. Building a bootable CD was another headache I didn't want to worry about and it wasn't clear to me I could get my BIOS to boot off of a SCSI CD anyway. One thing I've thought about looking into is get Yard to build such a CD. Other than making the CD bootable, seems like making a rescue CD should be a simple mod for Yard, whose purpose is building rescue floppy sets!? Anyway, all this was a year ago and it's rather fuzzy. Maybe by now there is an automated way to do it? Good Luck! Gary
