tomsrtbt on a CD
I quite often use Tom’s root-boot floppy to salvage scragged PCs but today I needed to fix a box which has no floppy drive.
Fortunately tomsrtbt comes in a CD-bootable version but you have to jump through a few hoops to make it work. So to save you the time and effort of figuring it all out for yourself, I have created an ISO image which can be burnt directly to a CD. You can download it right here:
tomsrtbt-2.0.103.iso (3.2 MB)
That’s all. You don’t need to keep reading but just in case you want to know, here’s how I created this ISO using Linux.
1. Go to Tom’s download page at http://www.toms.net/rb/download.html and choose your favourite mirror site.
2. Download the “ElTorito” image (note that the version number might not be the same as this example):
wget http://www.tux.org/pub/distributions/tinylinux/tomsrtbt/tomsrtbt-2.0.103.ElTorito.288.img.bz2
3. Decompress it:
bzip2 -d tomsrtbt-2.0.103.ElTorito.288.img.bz2
4. Create a file structure for your cd:
mkdir mycd mkdir mycd/boot mv tomsrtbt-2.0.103.ElTorito.288.img mycd/boot/
5. Finally, create the ISO image:
cd mycd mkisofs -b boot/tomsrtbt-2.0.103.ElTorito.288.img -c boot/boot.catalog -o tomsrtbt-2.0.103.iso .
Now you can use your favourite CD-burning tool to create a CD from the ISO image. Personally I like K3b for CD burning under Linux.

Very useful, thanks!
Comment by Johnathon Tinsley — 7 September 2006 @ 10:04 pm
Many thanks. I was in a situation where I needed tomsrtbt on a CD, but could not boot my linux box to create the iso, hence the need for tomsrtbt!
Comment by Kevin — 15 May 2007 @ 9:47 am