I need to make a disc that when you boot from it it loads up Linux (or some version) and runs a simple script to create a partition and copy a file to it. I need the disc to have DAR on it since the file that will be copied is too large to fit on one disc. I also need to footprint to be as small as possible. Any help on this would be great, Thanks!

Have a look at (i) Puppy Linux, which is quite user-friendly and, I think, has a live CD image available (it's also USB-bootable, which I find easier to handle, but older computers don't support booting from USB) or (ii) Linux From Scratch, which definitely has a live CD you can modify.

As for running a script at start-up, that depends on which of the above you use - Puppy Linux (and most other distros which use SysV-style system initialisation) has an rc.local file which is run (as root) first thing after initialisation, so just put the commands you want to run in that. It's usually /etc/rc.local.

John G

thanks ill give that a try, how would I go about adding DAR to the live CD?

any normal live-cd/ dvd/ usb/ sd would allow you to change the ~/.bash_profile of the live user (or better yet the /etc/rc.d/rc.local of the system) to run any miscellaneous commands you want.

by and by, what is dar

DAR is backup software, I used it to split a large file so it will fit on two DVD's the software im assuming will need to be installed in order for me to be able to execute the commands i need to restore the data.

here is the website for the software
http://dar.linux.free.fr/

ok, consider dsl to be a small footprint distribution.