Good rescue distro?

[jlehtone]

Oh my, memory fails.

I have a PC from about '97. Pentium Pro, 256 MB RAM. Boots from SCSI disk,
has multiple SCSI HDD and a CD. Later addition: 80 GB PATA, invisible to BIOS.
PC hasn't been in use for a while.

Multi-boot, W2K (boots up), and multiple Linux entries on grub.menu (all kernel panic).
Some early Fedora and late RedHat Linux. No solid memory of what and where.

Now I'd like to try one last time a backup files, wipe, and dismantle. But I'll need
some small distro to boot with. I doubt CentOS Live fits. Recommendations?

[lostson]

Knoppix is always a good choice.

http://www.knoppix.net/

[JakeS]

I personally, prefer Puppy Dog Linux, when it comes to old comps :-)

Has a few good tools also, I was gobsmacked when I see an old Pentium 2 @ 250Mhz, seem fast, yet be completely up to date! :-D

[jlehtone]

Thanks,

I did load Puppy (431) this time. Neat. Does not seem to include dmraid. Irrelevant
to current task, but could be handy elsewhere.

And as always ... I don't know how to burn CD's correctly. First was fubar, second ok.

BUT
the darned computer doesn't boot from CD. SCSI PlexWriter on Symbios 875 HBA.
MBR and /boot are on SCSI HDD, and that does boot. It is just that each kernel
proceeds until it fails to find "init". But they clearly load stuff from initrd ... unless
they were monolithic.

A mere side hobby, this archeological endeavour. :roll:

[gsmithe]

I like the system rescue cd: http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page
it's a live gentoo system.

Anyway to possibly help you on your boot problem, I remember a few years back that I had trouble booting CD's on computers that had older cd drives. I believe the fix was to pass options like "ide=nodma" on the boot parameters line.

I know you said it's scsi, but I'm just throwing it out there for fun.

Each bootcd is different, but I'm pretty sure that knoppix and most other debian based live cd's support that one.

http://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/FAQ#Q.3AThereseemtobeerrorsreadingtheCD.21

There's also the knoppix cheat codes wiki, which has so many options you might just go crazy trying each of them:

http://www.knoppix.net/wiki/Cheat_Codes

Good luck on your endeavor.

GS

[jlehtone]

[quote]gsmithe wrote:
I know you said it's scsi, but I'm just throwing it out there for fun.[/quote]
Yes, SCSI HBA does not load bootloader from CD, so no kernel parameter
would help.

I found unused PATA DVD. Puppy had some trouble, but then a recent
Knoppix DVD was an option.

All files (AFAIK) have been copied off. Whether anything can read certain
documents of proprietary format, is entirely unrelated headache.