On Mon, Oct 28, 2002 at 09:26:57PM -0800, Peter Jay Salzman wrote: > begin Ryan Castellucci <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > > Hash: SHA1 > > > > I'm looking to build a bootable CD to give to a friend along with a computer > > that when booted will offer to overwrite the hard drive from a compressed > > disk image. I looked on freshmeat, but didn't see anything well suited to > > this. The box in question will have windows on it (They want windows, I don't > > feel like arguing). Anyone know of a project that can do this? > > i'm not sure i understand. are you giving your friend a "nag-ware" > computer that nags him to install linux? :) > > > What about linux boot CDs that can easily be customized to run a shell script > > at boot time? > > not sure i understand this either. the whole runlevel initialization > mechanism is a method of executing shell scripts at boot. boot CD's > should have this too. > > when you say "easy", do you mean not having to conform to the standard > initialization script format? you can use rc.boot for that. > > if you want to make an OEM style recovery disk, i imagine you can > install linux and then dd/bzip2 up the entire hard drive. i'm guessing > that even if windows gets installed on top of linux, dd will restore > partition info. the backup image shouldn't be too big for a fresh > install. but your friend would lose all his data.
One would need to zero out the hard drive first, otherwise one will be trying to compress a whole hard drive's worth of random bits and fit it onto a single CD. dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda (or /dev/hda or whatever) should do nicely. dd will restore partition info, by the way. I've used it for backing up and restoring a partition table before. Just make sure to grab from /dev/sda, not /dev/sda1. (or hda, hda1, etc.) > pete > > -- > Fingerprint: B9F1 6CF3 47C4 7CD8 D33E 70A9 A3B9 1945 67EA 951D > _______________________________________________ > vox-tech mailing list > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech -- Samuel Merritt OpenPGP key is at http://meat.andcheese.org/~spam/spam_at_andcheese_dot_org.asc Information about PGP can be found at http://www.mindspring.com/~aegreene/pgp/
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