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)

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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.