An anecdote for Linux on CD

[Jason Clinton]

Just thought I'd share something cool that I improvised on a recent tech
support call.

I recently did some computer work for a client that had major disk
corruption causing Windows ME to fail to boot returning her to a DOS
prompt. A full scandisk did not fix the problem. We needed to recover
her personal data before doing a full wipe and restore.

I happened to have my 256mb USB flash drive and a Gentoo 1.4_rc4 boot
disc. I suppose you could use any sort of USB storage device -- but
anyways: I booted from the Gentoo disk, mounted her FAT32 partition,
insmod'd usb-storage.o, mounted /dev/sda to /mnt/flash, tar -cjf
MyDocuments.tar.bz2 /mnt/windows/My Documents/. I later went home and
burned it all to CD for her.

The Gentoo Linux 1.4_rc4 basic ISO is only 18 MB (could be burned to one
of those business card CD's) and contains a massive quantity of really
helpful tools to use in this sort of situation. lspci is especially
helpful for diagnosing hardware conflicts and the information provided
by /proc is also invaluable.

Anyways, just another reason everyone should have Linux in their
pocket.^(tm)

--
Just my three trits. GPG Finger Print:
7A81 0A2F 1ABE DC38 DABC  7C22 B2EE 2304 4A89 46BF