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!
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!
Many thanks, seems this is the only way to run tomsrtbt on vmware as it doesnt support the 1722 format floppy.
I’ve spent ages trying to figure out the correct syntax for the mkisofs command. This is very useful.
On another point, is there a way to include more files in the ISO? I’d like to leave a rescue CD in a server and, should it go pear-shaped, boot off tomsrtbt but also have some critical files on the same CD.
Any help appreciated.
John