CatRescue For Linux

CatRescue is a tool that generates a compact boot floppy with kernel, libraries an additional utilities you choose. It uses existing kernel and programs on your hard drive, so that you can always keep your boot floppy up-to-date with the main system. It also supports easy-to-use configuration files to specify which programs to include.

This is an ELF-only upgrade of CatRescue. In the process I also did some cleanup and added a few new features. If you used CatRescue 1.00 before, here are the most important changes:

CatRescue now uses an extended 1743K floppy format. This means that you need to use a new program, superformat from fdutil-4.1 or later, to prepare floppies. You also need to mount /dev/fd0H1743 instead of /dev/fd0. I wrote a custom boot sector for Lilo to boot extended formats; The binary is on standard rescue image as /boot/boot.x and source code is in "lilo" directory.

This is because ELF binaries don't compress as well as QMAGIC ones :)

e2defrag is now on a separate tools floppy, along with some new stuff.

This floppy will now work on 4M machine if you don't enable multiple virtual terminals.

This distribution is unusable on systems without ELF libc 5.x installed. Use CatRescue 1.00 instead. Note that there is a bug in 1.00 canned image - you need to add libext2.so.* to /mnt/usr/lib.

As Linux ELF support is still on development stage, some wrinkles are expected.

The simpliest way to make a floppy is to use the default image included with this distribution. First, you need to make a floppy device for 1743K format. If you didn't already install fdutil 4.1 or later, type as root:

# mknod /dev/fd0H1743 b 2 76 # chown root.floppy /dev/fd0H1743 # chmod 660 /dev/fd0H1743

To generate a floppy, do as a member of group floppy or root:

./superformat zcat image.gz | dd bs=1024 of=/dev/fd0H1743

You should write-protect the floppy, because it might otherwize get damaged if kernel fails to load it to RAM disk. You can now test the floppy by rebooting your system.

When asked to insert a RAM disk floppy, don't do anything, just press Enter. Enable multi-vt mode unless you have