Full featured boot image with support for LVM and RAID?

Message

1clue · Post by **1clue** » Sun Oct 17, 2021 2:32 am

Hi,

I just downloaded the System Rescue CD and it sucks. Likewise with Ultimate Boot CD.

The reason I'm putting it here is because I like to use those images to install pretty much any distro from. I'm interested in another Gentoo box right now, and I'm looking around for a "rescue cd" image, but for USB because it's 2021 now.

Oh yeah, and bootable from old-style or UEFI.

Can anyone recommend a really good USB distro that can be a swiss army knife of repair or installs? I'd rather not build it myself, but since System Rescue CD went downhill I'm kinda lost.

Thanks.

alamahant · Post by **alamahant** » Sun Oct 17, 2021 8:29 am

Maybe Manjaro.
or Ubuntu.
I remember Manjaro comes with zfs module installed for example.
So it is natural to assume it will have a wide range of functionality available.

dbtx · Post by **dbtx** » Sun Oct 17, 2021 8:51 am

KNOPPIX is still getting better. If you boot from the DVD (or the DVD ISO in a VM) you can have it install either the full DVD or the trimmed CD version onto a USB drive, or just dd the ISO onto it as usual and IIRC it has some way of taking and using the remaining space. I'm not certain of all the options and possibilities but I wanted to be able to still easily use the leftover space on the 16GB USB drive so I ran the proper utility inside VirtualBox and kept it as FAT32. It offers to create a RW, 4GB max, encrypted image file which automatically gets overlaid onto the read-only compressed root filesystem and preserves customization and user data across reboots.

It's based on Debian, without systemd. My one small complaint is that normally, Debian only makes available what we call sys-fs/ddrescue and not what we call sys-fs/dd-rescue, and I usually install both, but I prefer the latter.

1clue · Post by **1clue** » Mon Oct 18, 2021 3:43 am

Thanks. I'll look into them. Never tried either one. I've used Ubuntu heavily, but didn't know they had a rescue distro. Or are you just talking about their livecd?

Don't particularly want a GUI, but from the googling I've done I think I might be stuck with it now.

I've pondered a long while that Gentoo would be a really good distro to build into this sort of thing, but that's what System Rescue CD used to be. So why try?

Am I blind or are all the options gone from system rescue cd? I tried booting an older Ubuntu Server I had using the latest rescue CD and it didn't recognize lvm2 or raid.

Am I just an old fart complaining about how things used to be? Do people do something different now? I feel like that guy in the grocery store, gray hair and a walker, bellowing at teenagers about how they should be in school.

"When I was your age I WALKED to school. It was 7 miles. And it was UP HILL BOTH WAYS!"

dbtx · Post by **dbtx** » Mon Oct 18, 2021 6:38 am

1clue wrote:Gentoo would be a really good distro to build into this sort of thing, but that's what System Rescue CD used to be. So why try?

Agreed, though I'd say "to fill the vacuum, if there is one." Someone could "fork" SRCD right before v6 without needing much more than a copy of /etc and /var/lib/portage/world and maybe /proc/config.gz. I never went looking, and if anyone did something like a direct replacement or spiritual successor, it never appeared on my radar.

Am I blind ... Am I just an old fart complaining about how things used to be?

No, I think it just means you've noticed that unruly elephant in the room, how common sense is less and less common. But I don't know about all of what's happened to SRCD because I just kept using 4.9.0 until all of my LUKS headers were accidentally too new for it to be useful. Though I do remember being annoyed at having to respin the kernel because CONFIG_CMDLINE_PARTITION wasn't included.

dbtx · Post by **dbtx** » Mon Oct 18, 2021 5:18 pm

I've finally been reading about that Arch switcheroo to find out that quite naturally, someone already has, well at least one. I updated my primary USB drive to SRCD 5.3.2 just for its proper LUKS support-- if it even has that, and I can't remember if I even made sure yet-- but obviously I need to check out LRS.

C5ace · Post by **C5ace** » Tue Oct 19, 2021 12:45 pm

I use a portable 2TB USB drive with Gentoo, Xfce and all the utilities installed I need to maintain my family and friends desktops, laptops and a server. Including RAID and ntfs. This is also used to backup the laptops and to install Gentoo on new systems.

figueroa · Post by **figueroa** » Wed Oct 20, 2021 3:18 am

MX-Linux makes an awesome boot/rescue USB. Create your final USB with MX's own Live-USB-Maker and you can customize it and save the persistence so anything you want to add for fluff or giggles, you can. You can even remaster your custom version with MX-Linux' excellent tools. Current version is based on Debian Buster, but a version 21 is soon to be released (currently in RC1) based on Bullseye. MX-Linux tracks Debian stable.

ADDED: a 16 GB flash drive is needed to be able to remaster the live-usb. (Versions have original XFCE desktop, or KDE, or Fluxbox.) A 4 GB flash drive may be sufficient in order to just enable reasonable size persistence for some minimal customization. A couple of years ago, I did make an XFCE version USB flash drive on a 2 GB stick. That might still be possible, if not with XFCE certainly with the Fluxbox version.