Re: rescue cd

["Gary Hennigan" <glhenni@sandia.gov>]

"John Patton" <patton66@home.com> 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