Interesting article/tool:
ZDnet article on mkCDrecI created the recovery CD using my desktop machine and to test it I booted it up in VMware where it worked just fine. I stuck it in my laptop and it brought up the boot menu but when it started loading the kernel it just rebooted. I think I know why though. My desktop is an Athlon, my laptop is a Pentium. Not thinking about it I used the currently installed kernel for my desktop for the CD (duh). I don't think an Athlon optimized kernel will boot on an older Pentium.
I need to compile a basic kernel at the lowest common denominator so it will boot on everything, and I need to compile more file system support in anyway (xfs, reiserfs, NTFS). Thought some of you might be interested in this little item. My kernel recompile will have to wait until tomorrow.
The recovery CD maker is pretty slick. You can make just a recovery CD with all the basic tools, or you can have it back up your system to the CD as well. This will give you a bootable CD in case of a disaster that you can restore your system from. There is also a utility package that you can put on the CD that include things such as "chntpw" (reset a forgotten NT password on an NT partition), "grubconfig"/"liloconfig" to fix a boot loader etc.. Might be a handy thing to have lying around for those of you who don't like to make boot floppies at install time.
This is *not* a full fledged distro CD like a Knoppix or a SuSe Live CD. It's a clean cut basic bootable CD with everything you need to recover from many issues you could run in to on a Linux system (oopses). And it's easier than trying to figure out distro X's convoluted rescue mode. Mainly because you can easily put what you want on the CD above and beyond what's already there. Have fun.
