Escape Pod Linux

This is a single floppy diskette Linux that allows you to mount hard disks and make a CD copy of files on those hard disks. I call it "Escape Pod Linux" because it can be used to recover precious data from a computer that has problems and will no longer boot. However it's original inspiration was the simple need to make CDs of data on DOS systems, and the lack of a free tool to create ISO images in DOS.

The image file is escape-pod-1.0.img. Use dd or rawrite to place it onto a floppy formatted to 1.722 MB. The linux command to format a floppy diskette in drive A: to 1.722 MB is "fdformat /dev/fd0u1722".

I am currently collecting all the files and making sure I know where I got them from. You can email me if you need to recreate this from scratch or modify it. It is essentially just like the mc-link floppy, except the kernel uses modules and has ide-scsi on the diskette, and networking and mc are removed, and the cdrecord and mkisofs binaries from Slackware 8.1 are copied onto it.

A better solution to the original problem would be to take the source to the linux tool mkisofs and recompile it for DOS. This should be easy, since all mkisofs really does is read and write files, for which the C system functions should be the same on both DOS and Linux. If I do that, I will place a link to the result here.

Another possibility is to make a CDROM which would boot up into a ramdisk, unmounting the cdrom drive (in case the cdrom drive was the burner you needed to make the backup). Since a CDROM is larger one might even be able to put Mondo Rescue on it. Such a bootable CDROM would have the same functionality as Norton Ghost, but it would use Linux instead of Windows or DOS to make the bootable backup.


Robert G. Ristroph
Last modified: Sat Nov 15 14:09:24 CST 2003