CD burning Rescue Knoppix

[jago25_98]

Wouldn't it be great if you could bring a copy of Knoppix to a friends house and burn off data from thier broken NTFS Windows partition?
This is the goal I'm aiming for.

(The questions that need to be answered / solved are at the bottom)

- has there ever been an attempt to make a distro that boots off removable storage to burn a CD?

Do we need to run off CD?

- Booting from USB is problematic since not all motherboards support this. I haven't found a floppy boot disk that is able to enable a boot from usb.
- in contrast, http://btmgr.sourceforge.net/ allows much more to boot off CD.
- we could also use network, usb,firewire and HD backup mediums but not everyone has this option
- creating a floppy to mount ntfs, select files and burn a CD is probably beyond me!

The CD eject problem:

Due to the fact that we're probably running off CD at some point the boot CD will have to be removed and the writable CD inserted. The OS will need to run in memory for this duration.
As a result memory is at a premium. We don't want people with only 64mb to be unable to use this CD if possible.
Does this mean we're limited to the commandline? Possibly. However, there has been some big efforts to replace X and I'm looking for your advice here. Is X possible? I would really like to provide a GUI since this would make it a lot more attractive to non-techie types... though I suppose this could be a bad thing - maybe it's better to have only experts able to use this?
Kdrive takes up ~3.6mb RAM http://www.rule-project.org/en/sw/kdrive.php

The questions:

- Has anyone tried anything like this before?
- Is it necessary to create an iso before burning? This could be problematic if we're running off CD.
- What is the lightest CD burning front end you have ever seen? - For console and X?
- Other options to X other than kdrive? Framebuffer?

[OErjan]

eeeh, i have used knoppix and my external cdburner on several (numbered beyond counting) occasions to do just that, most reasonably new computers have usb so...
i have a paralell burner but that will not be recognized o some computers and only gives 4X speed...
oh, damn small linux has been used aswell. and that can be booted from usb, and you can help both the above get going with a boot floppy.

[blivius]

Yes you can boot off of a USB pendrive / floppy combo. I'm running Flonix USB off of a boot floppy. It's pretty impressive and great for running on older PC's. It comes with cdrecord and xcdroast and combined with partimage it's possible to backup your harddrive to a series of CD's.

I'm looking at remastering Flonix USB to include the Mondo backup package. My remaster would have a "backup/restore centric" focus.

I would like to hear your input/ideas on this project?

[nrasmus]

blivius,

I have been attempting to make this work (flonix w/ boot floppy). Could you elaborate as to how you accomplished it? I'm newbish regarding linux, so details are appreciated.


Thanks.