DisasterRecoveryCD

From HostGISLinux

The boot CD is meant for installing the OS, and is not a full-featured system rescue CD.

The boot/install CD does have the basic disk utilities: mount, fsck, mkreiserfs, cfdisk. It also has support for network devices, and a few network utilities which could be used to get data off your system when things get bad: ftp, scp, sftp, ssh.

The kernel is a jumbo kernel containing all hardware drivers: SCSI, RAID, and network. All hardware should be detected by the time you reach the installer's screen, and you can answer No to the installer and proceed to configuring your network card like this:

 # of course, use your own settings here
 ifconfig eth0 192.168.1.100 netmask 255.255.255.0 up
 route add default 192.168.1.1 eth0

Real system-recovery CDs

There are many good rescue/recovery CDs out there. One that we particularly like is called simply System Rescue CD, and is available at http://www.systemresccd.com/ It's a live CD, runs from a ramdisk, and has a really great set of tools, including boot-into hardware diagnostics, graphical partition managers, remote partition backup/restore, and the usual suite of filesystem utilities.

Preparedness being essential to good system administration, we'd recommend that you download it and get familiar with it today, before you need it. :) research paper