Rescue CD

This package is a small Linux rescue CD, suitable for booting systems that have become unbootable due to filesystem corruption or whatever. As an added bonus, everything is loaded into RAM - once the machine has booted, you can remove the CD from the drive.

It lies somewhere between minimalist boot floppies and large full-featured rescue CDs, and as such is suitable for putting on CDs wherever space is tight - for instance if you have 7Mb spare on your business card CD, you can add this package to it, and have a rescue CD that you can carry in your wallet.

Note that there are other, leaner, ways of doing this. For instance there is "busybox", which puts the most critical things (sh, ifconfig, that sort of thing) into one small executable; "uClibc", which is a tiny, slimmed-down C library; and so on. However, they involve more effort, and the system you get at the end has fewer features because of the space saving. The idea of this project is to allow you to quickly put together a reasonably featureful rescue disk on leftover space on a CD without needing any source code other than the Linux kernel source.

Currently, ivrescue is stable code. If you find any bugs, please report them.

To compile it you will need:

• ImageMagick
• dosfstools [dosfstools RPMs]
• SysLinux (at least v2.00)
• bzip2
• losetup [losetup RPMs]
• netcat (nc)
• ash
• isapnptools
• Pipe Viewer (pv)
• The tar.bz2 of a 2.4.x Linux kernel
• ...and the usual GNU/Linux build environment.

Please note that it has currently only been tested with kernels 2.4.17 - 2.4.25.

You can download the latest source tarball here:

• ivrescue-1.1.7.tar.gz (188k) [.gz signature] [MD5: aeb91cd926dd7b08b3f764203265b912]
• Sample bochsrc for booting the test ISO image with the Bochs emulator

If you just want to try it out without compiling the kernel then you can download a pre-built example ISO9660 filesystem, suitable for burning to a CD as track 1 (data mode), here:

• ivrescue-1.1.7.iso (6.8M) [ISO signature] [MD5: cadf46cf57db6f944339b6a50eb99390]

Comments, bug reports, and patches gratefully received - please use the Contact Form.

News

1.1.7 - 25 February 2004

• upgraded to kernel 2.4.25
• added sample bochsrc (for testing with Bochs)

1.1.6 - 1 December 2003

• upgraded to kernel 2.4.23

1.1.5 - 4 December 2002

• upgraded to kernel 2.4.20
• upgraded to ISOLINUX instead of using SYSLINUX, now boots on more systems
• switched to using pv (if available) in /usr loader
• more sh-friendly shell scripts for system init
• some small bugfixes in the Makefile
• fixes in the module dependency path changer
• changed build directory to build~ for CVS ignoring

1.0.3 - 27 August 2002 (never released)

• upgraded to kernel 2.4.19
• more intermediate steps, now more tolerant of interruption in build
• use the cramfs utility tarball for mkcramfs instead of from kernel source
• added workaround for depmod using "uname -r" to make modules directory, so building 2.4.19 image on a machine not running 2.4.19 will now work
• cosmetic: using pv, extracting kernel tar.bz2 gives progress indicator

1.0.2 - 11 July 2002

• userid lookup now working properly (i.e. copied libnss*file*)
• added shutdown, which no longer says "You don't exist. Go away"
• added chvt
• fixed Makefile bug so that "make" need only run once after a logo change

1.0.1 - 6 July 2002

• upgraded to kernel 2.4.18
• made boot script more tolerant of failure to find CDROM - tries 2 different drives and aborts to a shell

1.0.0 - 13 January 2002

• package released

0.1.0 - 12 January 2002

• package created