Well, this is not exactly what you are asking about, but I have built a number of Debian systems which run entirely from bootable floppies and CDs. I compiled a very short FAQ about the bootable CD based Linux system:
http://equusasinus.com/lxa/faq.html as well as more general information along with downloadable ISO images: http://equusasinus.com/lxa/index.html The bootable CD based system can boot from either a CD or a floppy but will mount its root from the CD in either case. Most of the existing configurations are oriented towards building specific sorts of Linux appliances that don't require any installation or any hard disk except maybe for spooling. The images mostly only have stuff needed to run specific services such as lpd or samba, but I (or you) could easily add other things that you want such as Lilo. The CD image for the LPA-CD configuration already includes tar, gzip, cpio, dd, mkfs, cp, rm, and (I think) fdisk, so it may already be most of the way there. The total space consumed is only about 27MB on the CD right now, so if I dropped ghostscript et. al., then you'd probably have close to 640 MB available for data storage. One other issue you may want to consider is whether to use CD-R or CD-RW media. The CD-RW is obviously re-usable for a certain number of times, but it is not universally readable by all old CD-ROM drives the way CD-R usually is. Let me know if you would like any specific help. If you would be interested enough in actually using a 'rescue cd' configuration, then I may start working on one myself. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Talk to your friends online and get email alerts with Yahoo! Messenger. http://im.yahoo.com/
