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"When a vulnerabily is found on your LiveCD you won't be able to patch it."

Slashdotters should know better...

You can boot from a live Linux CD and remaster it, which is very cool.

http://www.knoppix.net/wiki/Knoppix_Remastering_Howto

You can also keep a variety of live OS including custom WinPE versions.

http://www.911cd.net/forums/

"It was just dumb luck that we ordered machines with floppy drives or we would have had to try flashing the CD we were booting from...good luck with that...jeez."

You can build a bootable "floppy emulation" CD (after building the floppy image with Winimage on Windows or IIRC dd on Linux) and add whatever flash utils to it as required. You aren't restricted to a 1.44 meg image either, and you can easily toss more software on the rest of the CD if it doesn't fit on a 2.88 image.

There are also lots of tools for making bootable USB keys, and if you have a prog that supposedly requires Windows you might try WinPE/BartPE/etc instead. Everyone should IMO have a good stash of live CDs and their images. There is no reason not to have both PE and Linux CDs handy.

Useful forum with shitload of info:
http://www.911cd.net/forums/index.php
http://www.911cd.net/forums/index.php

I also have a CF card in an IDE adapter (they make bootable SATA adapters too) which is a convenient way to boot whatever will fit on the card (DOS, Linux, PE but I've not tried that) instead of the PC hard disk. Cheap and handy, and you can use it to rescue systems with no CD drive.

"It was just dumb luck that we ordered machines with floppy drives or we would have had to try flashing the CD we were booting from...good luck with that...jeez."

You can build a bootable "floppy emulation" CD (after building the floppy image with Winimage on Windows or IIRC dd on Linux) and add whatever flash utils to it as required. You aren't restricted to a 1.44 meg image either, and you can easily toss more software on the rest of the CD if it doesn't fit on a 2.88 image.

There are also lots of tools for making bootable USB keys, and if you have a prog that supposedly requires Windows you might try WinPE/BartPE/etc instead. Everyone should IMO have a good stash of live CDs and their images. There is no reason not to have both PE and Linux CDs handy.

Useful forum with shitload of info:
http://www.911cd.net/forums/index.php
http://www.911cd.net/forums/index.php

I also have a CF card in an IDE adapter (they make bootable SATA adapters too) which is a convenient way to boot whatever will fit on the card (DOS, Linux, PE but I've not tried that) instead of the PC hard disk. Cheap and handy, and you can use it to rescue systems with no CD drive.

'Ideally I would run the scan by unplugging the network cable and booting from directly the malware-scanner CD. Unfortunately nobody makes such a thing"

Plenty of people "make' them, but they are homebrew jobs because users prefer CDs packed with every prog they can throw on them. BartPE and WinPE live CDs haven't caught up with Knoppix yet, but they will run many useful apps. The combination of a live CD and a USB key can be quite handy too.

Google "bartpe antivirus" for starters, and check out:

http://www.911cd.net/forums/

Compared to either, a live Linux CD wins.

I can rescue, troubleshoot, surf with, and easily install from a variety of live Linux CDs.

The tools are there to build something similar:

http://www.911cd.net/forums/

using Windows PE exist, but MSFT doesn't bother. Too bad, really. It would make user lives easier.

I believe this is that Linux tool (or a reasonable facsimile):

http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/bootdisk.h tml

Found via the utilities list of the 911 Rescue CD web site.

Disclaimers: Haven't tried it, may contain spyware or viruses, scan before using, etc...

I believe this is that Linux tool (or a reasonable facsimile):

http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/bootdisk.h tml

Found via the utilities list of the 911 Rescue CD web site.

Disclaimers: Haven't tried it, may contain spyware or viruses, scan before using, etc...

Yes... not only can you boot from other removable media, but RAM disk too.

There's two flavours at the moment. ISO based readonly RAM Disk and the SDI based ReadWrite version. I find the latter the better, as it you don't need a secondary RAM Disk to get things like WMI working etc. The above images ISO/SDI images can be loaded over TFTP (F12 - PXE Network boot), CD, HD, USB, or any other bootable media, for real speedy XP. Oh, once the RAM disk is loaded you can remove the boot media too. :)

If you're interested, a good place to start is
http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=9 685&st=0 and http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=1 1048&hl=

On a side note there also a SYSLINUX patch http://remile.free.fr/syslinux/, (Needs a bit more work) that will load SDI images. Currently only works with XPe, so not no WinPE Minint functionality, but it's almost there.

Rob

Yes... not only can you boot from other removable media, but RAM disk too.

There's two flavours at the moment. ISO based readonly RAM Disk and the SDI based ReadWrite version. I find the latter the better, as it you don't need a secondary RAM Disk to get things like WMI working etc. The above images ISO/SDI images can be loaded over TFTP (F12 - PXE Network boot), CD, HD, USB, or any other bootable media, for real speedy XP. Oh, once the RAM disk is loaded you can remove the boot media too. :)

If you're interested, a good place to start is
http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=9 685&st=0 and http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=1 1048&hl=

On a side note there also a SYSLINUX patch http://remile.free.fr/syslinux/, (Needs a bit more work) that will load SDI images. Currently only works with XPe, so not no WinPE Minint functionality, but it's almost there.

Rob

Some people are way too into this. But when you see M$ Virtual PC running from a RAMDrive, that's just pretty cool.

We use a custom BartPE CD at work for data recovery and malware removal. Makes it easy to run SMART checks and copy off critical data from unbootable HDDs.

And you can run Adaware, McAfee Stinger, HijackThis and other tools on a drive without waking up TSR malware.

It's called BartPE. There are many Plugins available. People involved with this seem to all be members of the CD Forum.

• Copy the entire "I386" to a local directory
• download the updates via this link Network Install
• "Slipstream" the service pack to your local copy
• Dump it onto a CD with a bootable image that you make so the XP install will boot right

Personally I'd look at these sites Barts PE CD and 911CD They asist you in creating a recovery/util cd for win based systems, dos based utils and even small linux distro (Tomsrtbt). For just finding a good prog for testing hardware sisoft and aida are nice but search tucows nonags etc and you will find freeware progs that have tons of functionality and are not as bloated/intrusive as large name companies software (i.e Norton). Pisnaz

I'd say the 911 Rescue CD.

It contains more than 50 DOS-based diag tools collected from all over the internet and integerated in one compact and very easy to use interface, with help screens and features not found elsewhere.

I've tried it and I can't live without it, it's with me 24x7 for any problem.

Ah, I forgot to say it also includes a Windows 2000/XP installation right in the same CD, so it is very easy to setup Windows without even replacing the CD.

And i almost forgot the 911 CD...