[Techtalk] tomsrtbt

[Miriam English]

Maria McKinley wrote:

> I've been using tomsrtbt for years to do e2fsck on questionable drives, 
> but I may have hit the end of its usefulness. I used it today, and got 
> the messge that the file system had new features not supported by the 
> e2fsck on tomsrtbt. Judging from his website, I'd say the project has 
> been abandoned. Anyone have a suggestion for a more up-to-date bootable 
> rescue sort of distro? I prefer one that fits on a floppy, since some of 
> my machines don't have cd readers on them, but for the short term with 
> this particular machine, I could use one from a cd.

Puppy Linux http://www.puppylinux.com is small (around 80MB for many 
versions), and fast, and boots into a full-featured GUI Linux from a CD. 
It is also possible to boot it from a USB drive, though a machine that 
doesn't have a CD drive might not have a USB port.

I've used liveCD Puppy distributions to resurrect machines before.

Floppy-puppy used to be available, but I can't find it anymore. I've 
left a message on the Puppy forum asking about it. However while I was 
searching for it I stumbled across BlueFlops
http://blueflops.sourceforge.net/
which is a linux distribution that sits on just 2 floppies! It looks 
pretty amazing. I haven't tried it yet, but I certainly will. It is far 
more sophisticated than TomsRootBoot, with support for a lot of 
hardware, and even internet connectivity via graphical web browser(!) 
and IRC.

There is pico-pup, which is only about 7MB.
http://puptrix.org/isos/pico_pup.zip
I haven't used it yet, but I intend to.

There is a complete, but no-GUI, command-line Puppy. I haven't used it. 
At 28MB it is far too big to fit on floppies (unless you are patient 
enough to feed the machine about 20 of 'em), so it probably isn't much 
use to you unless there is some way to trim it down to just a couple or 
a few floppies.

There is also PuppyThin which is a full Puppy distribution that boots 
from a network. I haven't tried it. I'm not sure how much help it would 
be for you though.

Hope this helps.

	- Miriam