Sometimes we need heavy duty tools for our job. The standard system isn't powerful enough, even when logging in as adminstrator and installing programs. We will bypass the system, starting up the computer with a special CD: a boot CD. We'll do this to recover data, diagnose hardware problems, fix software issues or to move a system from one computer to another. But CDs get scratched or lost. Sometimes we're on site and we don't have the boot CD we need. Last week I decided enough was enough and I created a USB flash drive containing our main tools, which we'll have with us on our keyring wherever we are .

 

We wanted all our boot tools:

• System rescue CD - a linux live CD for recovering data and cloning systems: even Windows PCs and servers
• Knoppix - a linux live CD with a full desktop environment: similar to System Rescue CD but more powerful
• Ultimate Boot CD 4 Windows - a windows environment for removing spyware/viruses, backing up hard drives and fixing software issues
• DBAN - completely wipes hard drives on a sector by sector basis
• Memtest86 - a comprehensive RAM tester

We bought 10 x 4GB kingston USB flash drives : one for each engineer. The first stage was to make a working bootable flash drive with Ultimate Boot CD 4 windows. This was complicated somewhat by such large flash drives... They are too large for FAT16 and it's quite challenging to get Ultimate boot CD 4 Windows to boot off a FAT32 flash drive. So I used the Ultimate Boot USB utility which formatted the drive as FAT32, copied Ultimate Boot CD 4 Windows and made it bootable with the syslinux bootloader.

Next came the task of integrating all our other tools. Since the syslinux bootloader was already installed it was just a case of copying the correct files off the other CDs and editing the syslinux config file.

It was great fun to overcome the technical challenge, but more importantly each engineer now has a powerful toolkit on his keyring so we can fix tricky problems even faster.