Here are Charles Campbell's notes on the session at TriTekNix :
At our July 23rd meeting Ed Weinberg showed us the importance of having Linux recovery floppies and/or CD's.
We are all aware of the importance of having emergency boot disks, but they assume the installation is intact,
merely unbootable because of problems with Lilo or Grub, a new motherboard, etc. Ed showed us how to get around
those problems.
The first is an amazingly compact install of Linux which fits on a floppy (formatted as 1.722, not 1.44
and therefore bootable only from DOS or Windows 9x). With this floppy (a program called Tomsrtbt,
downloadable from
www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/system/recovery/) you can open Linux without actually installing
it or running it from your hard drive. BTW if the ibiblio site is slow or busy,
www.toms.net/rb/ will offer you several mirror sites. Suppose you have a corrupted install, but need to lift some files
off the drive that have not been backed up. Tomsrtbt will give you access to your Linux partitions. It seems to be
smart enough to find your keyboard, mouse, display, and network card! You can also download it as an image and burn
it onto one of those tiny CD's which you can carry in your shirt pocket.
So how do you format a 1.722 floppy? Tomsrtbt does it for you! Unzip the downloaded file into a directory, then
re-boot with a dos boot disk. Have a look at tomsrtbt.faq, which is very informative re both dos and linux installs,
but the simple answer is just stick a floppy in your drive, go to the directory where you unzipped tomsrtbt, type install,
and you're done. The FAQ warns that the install batch file could wreck an antique floppy drive, so if you're
into vintage hardware, be warned!
The second is LinxuCare's Tool Kit. This will not fit on a floppy, but at only 49 MB it can also be burned onto
a tiny CD. Just be sure your BIOS will boot from a CD. Download from
http://open-projects.Linuxcare.com/
Ed may want to amplify these notes when he has time, but what he showed us is so valuable we wanted you to have at least this much
info without delay.
