ivrescue 1.1.7 review

ivrescue is a small Linux rescue CD, suitable for booting systems that have become unbootable due to filesystem corruption or whateve

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: Andrew Wood

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ivrescue is a small Linux rescue CD, suitable for booting systems that have become unbootable due to filesystem corruption or whatever. As an added bonus, everything is loaded into RAM - once the machine has booted, you can remove the CD from the drive.

It lies somewhere between minimalist boot floppies and large full-featured rescue CDs, and as such is suitable for putting on CDs wherever space is tight - for instance if you have 7Mb spare on your business card CD, you can add this package to it, and have a rescue CD that you can carry in your wallet.

Note that there are other, leaner, ways of doing this. For instance there is "busybox", which puts the most critical things (sh, ifconfig, that sort of thing) into one small executable; "uClibc", which is a tiny, slimmed-down C library; and so on.

However, they involve more effort, and the system you get at the end has fewer features because of the space saving. The idea of this project is to allow you to quickly put together a reasonably featureful rescue disk on leftover space on a CD without needing any source code other than the Linux kernel source.

To compile it you will need:

ImageMagick
dosfstools [dosfstools RPMs]
SysLinux (at least v2.00)
bzip2
losetup [losetup RPMs]
netcat (nc)
ash
isapnptools
Pipe Viewer (pv)
The tar.bz2 of a 2.4.x Linux kernel
...and the usual GNU/Linux build environment.

What's New in This Release:
upgraded to kernel 2.4.25
added sample bochsrc (for testing with Bochs)