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Good teeny distro for mostly data copying/recovery?

Cerb

Cerb

Elite Member
I've got a spare 512MB flash drive, and I'd like to use it for grabbing files off of bad/infected PCs, among other things (other things = must still have some room to install a package or two).

Aside from Puppy, what are some good ones, that can be installed for such a small drive, with a decent WM/DE? I don't care about speed, so much (P4/512MB will be about the minimum I see, and most are C2Ds or better), as finding a good reason not to junk such a small drive. 😛
 
Lots will go on there. PartedMagic makes a great rescue drive. TinyCore will maximize space. SliTaz is kind of nice, or you could roll your own with Debian.
 
I'd like to able to mostly just add packages, but if it has a good build environment, like Slackware, some compiling here and there wouldn't be a problem (I've considered TinyCore, but it's frustrating if not working on mastering a fixed deployment setup). I've been meaning to try Slitaz anyway, so I'll give that a run.

I'd like to make it a small WM/DE with as many functions as I can fit (or rather, the ability to add packages), rather than something very pointed, like PartedMagic.
 
Update. Slitaz was very cool, especially for how tiny it is, when it worked. Of 4 PCs I tried, ranging from an old Dimension 3000, to a brand new Lattitude, video crapped out on two of them, after changing boot options, and it wouldn't boot w/o turning off ACPI (which could very well be related to video not working right, too).

By a chance of mirror speed, Slax ended up being my next choice (I was getting Absolute, and Debian and Ubuntu netinsts, but at snails paces), a bare bones KDE coming in under 300MB installed. Purrfect. Each time you boot, you can choose whether to save or discard changes. It automounts, handles hardware well, and generally ran without a hitch. Being Slack, it shouldn't be hard to extend with some extra packages (it is pretty bare), which I'll try a few of, soon (I might have to temporarily move it to a bigger stick, or a VM, to get the builds done, though 😛). But, with 200MB to spare, it should be fine.

My main goal, aside from not throwing the thumb drive away, is to have something that boots quick, to mess with PCs that Windows either fails at, or that are hosed too much to bother (my use for it as soon as I found it to work in every PC I could test with just fine, was to nab a bunch of user files off of a super-duper-infected HDD that needs nuking from orbit 🙂).
 
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