What do you do when your system doesn’t boot? If you happen to have disks provided by a distribution vendor, then you can probably boot from them; however, you can often only use them to reinstall the operating system, not repair your system.
What do you do when your system doesn’t boot? If you happen to have disks provided by a distribution vendor, then you can probably boot from them; however, you can often only use them to reinstall the operating system, not repair your system.
What you need is a bootable rescue disk that contains tools you can use to diagnose what’s wrong with your system and fix it. If the rescue disk is a floppy (with a capacity of 1.44 MB) rather than a CD-ROM, it can be very challenging to cram all the tools you want on it.
Since inexpensive CD-ROM burners have become widely available, it’s possible to build a bootable CD-ROM full of tools. This month’s project lets you do exactly that.
Project Summary
Back in 1999, when Linux and the IPO market were booming, some of the folks at Linuxcare had a great idea: a “Bootable Business Card” (BBC). They used a CD-ROM in the dimensions of a business card (able to hold about 50 MB) and placed a miniature Linux distribution on it.
They had two goals in mind: put as many useful system recovery and networking tools on the CD as possible and put their brand name on it so that folks would remember Linuxcare. The project was incredibly successful at both. Linuxcare gave away over 10,000 BBCs. Demand for them was so high that Linuxcare made ISO images available for download on its Web site so that folks could…
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