Redhat/Fedora/RHEL based rescue system on a "Pen-drive"

[robert hunter]

Hi,

I was wondering if anybody has had any success installing an RPM/Redhat
based rescue/forensics environment on a flash memory [EEPROM] pen drive.
The SLAX distribution, a live-CD version of Slackware, has a small
environment called "Frodo" which works fine. It is about 40 Megabytes
and fits on my 128 MB Apacer "Handy Steno", which leaves me plenty of
room for anti-virus tools etc to fix up "Windoze" client machines. [Yeh,
I know, they shouldn't be using Microsoft crap anymore, but some people
enjoy their bad habits.]

At the moment I am trying to make a "dual-boot" Fedora / XPProf rescue
system based a basic Fedora system and an XP rescue system made from
Bart's Boot disk on a one GIG USB drive [ /dev/sda1 & /dev/sda2 ] but I
am having trouble fitting it all in. Both partitions have trouble if I
try to make the pendrive "read-only". [It has a "hard switch"] Well, no
surprise there as far as Windows is concerned, but I am puzzled by Linux
not liking a "read-only" "hard drive", as I am using part of RAM for my
swap file, with some RAM space for /etc and /var as well. The idea is to
protect the Linux partition from rootkits etc, and the windoze part from
viruses, by making as much as posible "read-only", like a live-CD
environment. I mainly want to use an RPM-based distro, as I prefer the
utilities.

Has anybody else out there fooled with this?

Rob Hunter

RHCT