ADAM'S WEB PRESENCE

12 June 2006

tomsrtbt on a CD

Filed under: Nerd Notes — adam @ 11:21 pm

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.

4 Comments »

  1. Comment by Johnathon Tinsley — 7 September 2006 @ 10:04 pm

    Very useful, thanks!

  2. Comment by Kevin — 15 May 2007 @ 9:47 am

    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!

  3. Comment by stu — 11 February 2010 @ 10:42 am

    Many thanks, seems this is the only way to run tomsrtbt on vmware as it doesnt support the 1722 format floppy.

  4. Comment by John — 8 June 2010 @ 12:25 am

    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

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