At the risk of this sounding like another "What's the best distro" thread, I have a very specific function in mind. What I would like to know is if there is any distro specifically designed with PC technicians in mind, i.e. a minimalistic distro with no X-server or office apps but that includes the usual low-level tools like fdisk, badblocks, gpart, basic networking apps, etc. that can be booted from one or two floppies. The reason I ask is that I've often been asked to fix computers running Windows that have crashed spectacularly and can only be gotten alive again by booting up Linux from a CD, running fdisk, etc. to find out what is going on and then maybe Windows will be happy again. However the CD I usually use is an installation disk for one of the larger distros which I use the option to boot the rescue system from. This seems rather overkill and I don't always have all the tools I need. Is there a distro specifically designed for such things?

If your not looking for the full featured live cd distro like knoppix.. check out BBC linux.. works sort of the same way but slimmer and more of a live cd distro for fixing a machine instead of using it as a regular OS.

are you looking exclusively for liveCD's?

trickykid wrote:

Sound good but what's the home page? I gave up after the fifth page of a Google Search (though I now know a lot about the LNX-BBC - Linux Bootable Business Card.

Mind you, I did find this which looks interesting!

BTW trickykid, your sticky entitled "How to pick a distribution for youself ?" needs updating, the first two or three links I clicked on were broken.

eNightmare wrote:

Negative. All I need really is a minimal system that allows me to get into an otherwise un-cooperative Windows machine so that I can play around with the hard drive, etc. and work out if there is a hardware error or if it really is Windows' fault after all. A live CD is OK but boot floppy would also be good or, if we want to get serious about it, how about remotely booting a computer from a diagnostic laptop and testing the desktop hardware from that. Get the idea?

Perhaps Knoppix-STD may be of interest, although it is primarily designed for security work. I don't use this myself and don't know that much about it, but the utilities it comes with may be helpful. -- J.W.

I need to say against Knoppix-STD (because I needed that once) that it does not come with some important apps for recovering a system like gpart which are included in Knoppix, so standard Knoppix is better for me.

I don't know about BBC but I will give it a try.

http://www.lnx-bbc.org/

If you are looking also for a floppy-based distro look here:

http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=links#floppy

This list might also interest you:
http://old.lwn.net/Distributions/

Yves

Have you considered "Tom's floppy which has a root filesystem and is also bootable" at :

http://www.toms.net/rb/

It's pretty mind-boggling how much stuff he manages to squeeze onto 1 floppy, I used it before on an ancient laptop which had a dead HD and couldn't boot from CD and it was pretty cool

Coming from another PC Tech I would download and try Ultimateboot CD. You can find it at www.ultimatebootcd.com and it is free. The disk itself has loads of tools for almost anything that you can think of. For your uses I would go ahead and download the Full version which will give you qtparted as well as the ability to mount NTFS drives with captive. I use this disk almost exclusively unless I have a problem on one of the servers here at work which calls for specific proprietary apps.

Thanks for the links guys, looks like I've got some research to do!

Here is a good link:
Linux-Forensics.com
http://www.linux-forensics.com/links.html

Bingo! Ta!


Hey, I just became a member!! Cool!!

I would suggest Arch then. It doesn't install anything that you don't want. You can even choose not to install certain base packages.