[conspire] successful install, at last

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Paul Zander (paulz at ieee.org):

>  REPLIES BELOW, ALL IN CAPS

Wow, my eyes hurt.  

I'm guessing from your X-Mailer header that you're using some sort of
Yahoo webmail composer environment.  Maybe you can find some way to do
real interleaved replying with it.


>> Well, what do you want to be able to do [with tools on a rescue disk]?
> 
> Many new computers do not have an optical drive.  It will have to be on
> a USB.

Well, not exactly.  At bare minimum, netbooting and eSATA exist, too.
I would also suggest that any computerist household ought to have at
least one external optical drive (which these days, might as well be a
burner drive able to read or write BluRays, DVDs, and CDs) for
occasional needs.

'External' means in an external enclosure.  

For optical drives (where you need a cutout in the front):
https://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&DEPA=0&Order=BESTMATCH&Description=external+optical+drive+enclosure&ignorear=0&N=-1&isNodeId=1

For hard drives:
https://www.newegg.com/Hard-Drive-Enclosures/SubCategory/ID-92?Tid=168528

Notice that, like it or not, the computing world has ditched USB 2.x and
moved to 3.0.  Your best-equipped enclosures now have dual access via
eSATA or USB 3.0 ports.


> This eliminates the constraint of packing into less than
> 700MB.  In previous email, 

737MB with error-correction.  ;->

CDR media are of course cheaper than DVD+RW/DVD-RW or BluRay media, but
not by a lot, so if you keep the latter in stock and have a compatible
optical drive, you have a great deal of storage available for cheap.  As
a reminder:

single-layer DVD capacity:  4.7 GB 
dual-layer DVD capacity:  ~8.5 GB (subtypes differ)
single-layer BD-R or BD-RE capacity: 25 GB
dual-layer BD-R DL or BD-RE DL capacity: 50 GB
triple-layer BD-XL TL capacity: 100 GB
triple-layer BD-XL DS (double-sided) TL capacity: 200 GB
quadruple-layer BD-XL QL capacity: 128 GB

Of course, the prices rise with capacity, partly because it's the usual
demand-curve effect from new technology.  (Early adopters pay through
the nose.)   Last I heard, BD-XL TL discs, for example, start around
$10.  But still, potentially useful stuff, especially the 'RE' (read
_and_ erase) variants that can be wiped and rewritten a large number of
times.

At bare minimum, I would not (in 2018) buy any new CD media except as
dictated by very unusual needs, as DVD rewritable media are a much
better value.

But anyway, I'm not clear what any of this has to do with rescue disks,
unless we're talking about quite different things.  To my mind, what's
on SystemRescueCD has an ample array of rescue/maintenance tools
including GNU Parted, PartImage, and FSTools.  It even has a
novice-friendly XFCE4 DE.  They also have what look like fairly painless
instructions for assembling your own respin if you really can't do
without some oddball piece of software they don't include.

http://www.system-rescue-cd.org/

And, of course, you wouldn't need to write it to an _optical_ disc.  You
could write it to a USB flash stick (they have instructions) or netboot
it.


> Mention was made of partition tool and writing zeros.
> Virtually all live distros include some partition tool.  
> If you like fdisk, fine.

/sbin/fdisk is ideal for manual partitioning of mass storage that uses
IBM/Microsoft-style partition tables (ideal because it won't try to
second-guess you).  To my surprise, it appears that new versions support
GPT partitions (stands for GUID Partition Table), increasingly
inescapable along with EFI on newer hardware.  

The estimable Rod Smith has a detailed set of pages about this matter:
http://www.rodsbooks.com/gdisk/ .  I'm gathering that basically what
happened is someone rewrote fdisk _and_ sfdisk (mentioned below) to
include GPT support, so sometimes those variants are referred to with a
'g' prefix, like gfdisk and gsfdisk, or sometimes without the 'g'.  
At least two of the really good rescue/maintenance images include the
'g' variants:  PartedMagic, SystemRescueCd.  Well, RIPLinuX (RIP =
Recovery Is Possible) does, as well, but that distro's been unmaintained
since 2012, so let's not count it.

For GPT, you might want something like GNU PartEd, though (with or
without the GParted graphical front-end, mentioned below).  I have
noting against PartEd.

As Michael Paoli keeps reminding me, sfdisk is the cat's meow for
_scripted_ partition manipulations (scripted being what the 's' stands
for).  It also supports GPT.

> Personally I would prefer a GUI.   I have used fdisk so seldom that I
> would spend 90% of my effort figuring out exactly what to type.

To dredge up the old joke:  If you desire a GUI for /sbin/fdisk, just
run it in an xterm.

But, hey, whatever you want, get that thing and be happy.

The Parted Magic disk (LXDE window manager, BTW, last I heard) includes
a graphical program called Partition Editor, which I take to be an alias
for _GParted_.  GParted is simply a GTK+ graphical front-end to GNU
PartEd.  So -- no surprise whatsoever -- you're using GNU PartEd.

SystemRescueCd (XFCE4 desktop, as mentioned) likewise has GParted.
I'm guessing you'd like Parted Magic a bit more because it has a bit
more stuff in it, but both merit consideration if you're looking for
that sort of thing.


> The following will fill the partition with zeros.
> 
> dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=1M

Depending on the 'X' in '/dev/sdX', you might actually overwrite not
just a partition but an entire disc, so be careful what you type, there.

Yes, certainly you can use good ol' dd to zero-fill anything at all.

Sometimes, the aim of zero-filling is to approximate a 'secure erase' of
disc contents, so in that case you might prefer using the shred commend,
which is probably just a wrapper around dd, allowing the admin to
specify how many write passes to do.  (We've covered the 'secure erase'
thing here before, including mention of DBAN, Darik's Boot and Nuke.
Before someone else mentions it, all of these methods are _not_ good
enough to defeat state-level opponents wanting to recover your erased
data.  LLNL melts disk platters that have housed secret files and will
settle for nothing less, for example.)

I always in general prefer basic tools like dd for maintenance
operations.  If I had a dodgy SATA or PATA drive I wanted to recover, I
might use it _or_ try a zero-filling utility from the manufacturer on a
theory that it might build in some extra tricks.  Dunno.  Might try
both.

With a hard drive, economic considerations always enter, e.g., if I have
a hard drive that appears to be suffering a lot of bad sectors and I've
already secured a good copy of any wanted contents, there's a limit to
the amount of time and effort it makes sense to expend on the problem
child, remembering that your time and trouble has value and occasionally
re-checking the price of modern drives on NewEgg.


> The verbs you want to search on for any given distro are probably
> either 'remaster' or 'respin'.  So, for example, searching 'remaster
> debian' brings up a bunch of links of interest.  Which see.  

[search terms for live distros including 'remaster' or 'respin':]

> Yes that search gives many hits, and the first one I looked at
> suggested a use that was behind my original question.  Save a new
> custom install including the bunch of aps that I want.

My point is that some distros are more remastering/respinning-friendly
than others, and, in doing some targeted searching, you may find good
runthrough documentation that you find encouraging.

> Again, what tools would I want in such a distro?

I'm sorry to have to throw the question back at you, but I honestly am
unclear on what _you_ would want in such a distro -- because I'm unclear
on your objectives.  Above you'll find mention of two typical and
well-maintained maintenance-focussed distros.  Perhaps reading about
them will be useful to you.