A rescue disk is a bootable floppy or cdrom that puts Linux into RAM where it can run without needing to access your installation on the hard drive. This is very useful when you cannot boot your system or in cases where you don’t have a Linux system installed yet.
A rescue disk may be the installation disk for your distro. Most of them have a way that you can boot the disk into this mode rather than booting into installation mode. It might also be a specially designed disk just for the purpose of rescue. These are usually rather small downloads–some fit on a floppy. Some are strictly command line, but something like Knoppix is going to give you a nice graphical interface.
A rescue disk has critical programs on it such as a partitioning program and an editor. They also have programs to find, mount, list, move, and delete files. The smaller the rescue disk, the more rudimentary will likely be the programs. You may find only vim for an editor although most seem to have nano now as well. fdisk is the most likely to be found for partitioning, but parted or cfdisk may be there. So, getting a rescue disk before you need it and trying it out is a very good idea.
About a 100Mb download http://www.sysresccd.org/ It has the usual things as well as QtParted which will resize partitions including NTFS. It goes on a cdrom.
For either cdrom or 1.44 floppy. http://www.tux.org/pub/people/kent-robotti/looplinux/rip/
It has large filesystem support, you can use the programs dd, mke2fs, mkdosfs, mkreiserfs, split, mount, tar, gzip, and bzip2 with files bigger than 2GB. It includes the partition resizing program parted and the mc file manager. No GUI here!
Tomsrtbt stands for: “Tom’s floppy which has a root filesystem and is also bootable.”
While Knoppix is not the classical rescue disk, it can be used to repair your installation. It is a full system running from CD or DVD. If you connect to the internet through some kind of router (DSL/cable/companie network/…), Knoppix uses that connection. So, you have access to all the resources of help on the net (Webpages, mail, IRC, whatever).
Knoppix is also nice to check a PC for Linux-compatibility before the actual installation and to show off Linux to your friends on their machines. So you probably want to download it before you get into trouble with your installation :) http://www.knopper.net
— Stefan Waidele jun. 2005/08/10 13:44
According to the manual for SUSE 9.1, you could get into rescue via the install disk as described here: http://www.novell.com/documentation/suse91/suselinux-adminguide/html/ch12s05.html
In the latest manual for SUSE 10.1, that does not appear. Instead there are instructions for making a rescue floppy to use. You can download the complete manual here: http://www.novell.com/documentation/suse101/index.html It is a pdf - SUSE Linux 10.1 Start-up Guide. In part it says:
2.5.3 Boot and Rescue Disks Create boot and rescue disks with System → Boot or Rescue Floppy. These floppy disks are helpful if the boot configuration of your system is damaged. The rescue disk is especially necessary if the file system of the root partition is damaged. ... Rescue Floppy This disk contains a special environment that allows you to perform maintenance tasks in your installed system, such as checking and repairing the file system and updating the boot loader. To start the rescue system, boot with the standard boot disks then select Manual Installation → Start Installation or System → Rescue System. Insert the rescue disk when prompted.
Help from Recovery Is Possible - a good listing of the things you can do with the disk and basics of how to do it. This file is on the floppy and can be read with the command ‘help.’
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