[vox-tech] How to make an OEM style "system recovery disk"

[Peter Jay Salzman]

begin Ryan Castellucci <ryan+lugod@cal.net> 
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> I'm looking to build a bootable CD to give to a friend along with a computer 
> that when booted will offer to overwrite the hard drive from a compressed 
> disk image. I looked on freshmeat, but didn't see anything well suited to 
> this. The box in question will have windows on it (They want windows, I don't 
> feel like arguing). Anyone know of a project that can do this?
 
i'm not sure i understand.  are you giving your friend a "nag-ware"
computer that nags him to install linux?  :)

> What about linux boot CDs that can easily be customized to run a shell script 
> at boot time?

not sure i understand this either.   the whole runlevel initialization 
mechanism is a method of executing shell scripts at boot.   boot CD's
should have this too.

when you say "easy", do you mean not having to conform to the standard
initialization script format?  you can use rc.boot for that.

if you want to make an OEM style recovery disk, i imagine you can
install linux and then dd/bzip2 up the entire hard drive.  i'm guessing
that even if windows gets installed on top of linux, dd will restore
partition info.   the backup image shouldn't be too big for a fresh
install.  but your friend would lose all his data.

pete
 
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