Are there any universal recue disks out there that are not disto specific. I have a p133 laptop and i have a nice generic version of linux that i want to boot off of a pcmcia Port noteworthy cd/dvd rom. Mandrake's pcmcia boot disks detect the cdrom and start the install but mandrake 9 runs slow and a simpler version of linux is required. I need a boot disk to recognize the pcmcia cdrom and boot it. I wrote a bootsector in assembler and would like to use that eventually to load grub or lilo.? is there any way to add the pcmcia drivers into lilo or grub. thanx

try the knoppix disk or the Gentoo disk 1

i think with Gentoo, you can type pcmcia at the boot: prompt (probably the same with knoppix)

as far as booting from pcmcia, not sure 100% as i dont use laptops but i think that may be a bios thing. i could be dead wrong. I know Gentoo and Knoppix will both want to boot the CD but neither install anything but i dont think you can detect, then boot from the pcmcia drive with those 2 CDs.

I tryed knoppix so ill try the gentoo disk. thanx