Re: [vox-tech] How to make an OEM style "system recovery disk"

[Ryan Castellucci <ryan+lugMAPSod@cal.net>]

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On Monday 28 October 2002 09:26 pm, Peter Jay Salzman wrote:
> begin Ryan Castellucci <ryan+lugod@cal.net>
>
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> > I'm looking to build a bootable CD to give to a friend along with a
> > computer that when booted will offer to overwrite the hard drive from a
> > compressed disk image. I looked on freshmeat, but didn't see anything
> > well suited to this. The box in question will have windows on it (They
> > want windows, I don't feel like arguing). Anyone know of a project that
> > can do this?
>
> i'm not sure i understand.  are you giving your friend a "nag-ware"
> computer that nags him to install linux?  :)

Well, the windows installation (98se) crashes unusualy often (I got about 3 
error messages about invalid page faults the first time it booted.  It's 
rather old (K6-2 300), and I was going to put linux on it, but she wanted 
windows. This is a female friend who currently has a pre 486 pc and can't 
really afford a new one. I do not think she should have any problems with a 
minimal linux install aside from figuring out what does what. AFAIK she wants 
mainly Yahoo messenger, a web browser and an office suite,

It's kind of a problem, give her a pirated copy of windows, which is what she 
wants, or a Linux install that will probably meet her needs fine.

Debian with gnome would probably be fine

> > What about linux boot CDs that can easily be customized to run a shell
> > script at boot time?
>
> not sure i understand this either.   the whole runlevel initialization
> mechanism is a method of executing shell scripts at boot.   boot CD's
> should have this too.
>
> when you say "easy", do you mean not having to conform to the standard
> initialization script format?  you can use rc.boot for that.

That will do, problem is finding a bootable CD to start with. I was going to 
use LNX-BBC, but they don't appear to have sorce snapshots of the 1.x 
available. From the FAQ

"All of the 1.x versions of the BBC and LNX-BBC were built by taking binaries 
from a variety of sources (hand-compiled, out of Debian packages, etc) and 
just throwing them together. As of September 2002, there has not yet been a 
release of the LNX-BBC that uses the GAR tree."

What i mean by easy, is somthing that will be easy to make changes to and 
rebuild. 

tomsrtbt would be good, but I'm not sure how to modify it to work with a CD. 
The ElTorito boot image seems to be broken.

> if you want to make an OEM style recovery disk, i imagine you can
> install linux and then dd/bzip2 up the entire hard drive.  i'm guessing
> that even if windows gets installed on top of linux, dd will restore
> partition info.   the backup image shouldn't be too big for a fresh
> install.  but your friend would lose all his data.

I know, but it _will_ fix nearly anything broken.

yes, dd will restore partition info, I've tried it.

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