[Rescue CD Splash Screen] This package is a small Linux rescue CD, suitable for booting systems that have become unbootable due to filesystem corruption or whatever. As an added bonus, everything is loaded into RAM - once the machine has booted, you can remove the CD from the drive.

It lies somewhere between minimalist boot floppies and large full-featured rescue CDs, and as such is suitable for putting on CDs wherever space is tight - for instance if you have 7Mb spare on your business card CD, you can add this package to it, and have a rescue CD that you can carry in your wallet.

Note that there are other, leaner, ways of doing this. For instance there is "busybox", which puts the most critical things (sh, ifconfig, that sort of thing) into one small executable; "uClibc", which is a tiny, slimmed-down C library; and so on. However, they involve more effort, and the system you get at the end has fewer features because of the space saving. The idea of this project is to allow you to quickly put together a reasonably featureful rescue disk on leftover space on a CD without needing any source code other than the Linux kernel source.

Currently, ivrescue is stable code. If you find any bugs, please report them.

To compile it you will need:

Please note that it has currently only been tested with kernels 2.4.17 - 2.4.25.

You can download the latest source tarball here:

If you just want to try it out without compiling the kernel then you can download a pre-built example ISO9660 filesystem, suitable for burning to a CD as track 1 (data mode), here:

Comments, bug reports, and patches gratefully received - please use the Contact Form.

If you liked ivrescue, please consider a donation:

News

1.1.7 - 25 February 2004
1.1.6 - 1 December 2003
1.1.5 - 4 December 2002
1.0.3 - 27 August 2002 (never released)
1.0.2 - 11 July 2002
1.0.1 - 6 July 2002
1.0.0 - 13 January 2002
0.1.0 - 12 January 2002