In System Rescue 1.5.1 i386 CD the boot process is now. This important modification follows the complete rewrite of the initramfs which was achieved in SystemRescueCd-1.5.0.
The initramfs is the compressed file (initram.igz) which is loaded just after the kernel image. It loads important drivers (disk controller drivers and Ethernet drivers for network boot), it processes many options from the boot command line and it starts the normal system. This new versions is based on udev so that only the appropriate drivers are loaded, which accelerates the boot process. In old versions all supported kernel drivers were loaded in the first stage of the boot process. This new version still support the “doload=mod1,mod2,mod3? and “noload=mod1,mod2,mod3? which allows you to force / blacklist kernel modules. It also preserves compatibility with the existing boot options (ethx=ip, dns=ip, gw=ip, dodhcp, netboot=url, root=auto, root=LABEL=xxx, …)
SystemRescueCd-1.5.1 also comes with two important modifications: parted-2.2 has been patched to fix usability problems (”failed to re-read the partition table” error) which was annoying especially in GParted. This release also fixes problems with the intel xorg driver (xf86-video-intel) which makes the graphical environment extremely slow.
The standard kernels (32bit: rescuecd, 64bit: rescue64) are now based on a new configuration in order to provide a better support for hardware especially for disk controller and network drivers (including in the initramfs).
About Systemrescuecd
SystemRescueCd is a Linux system rescue disk available as a bootable CD-ROM or USB stick for administrating or repairing your system and data after a crash. It aims to provide an easy way to carry out admin tasks on your computer, such as creating and editing the partitions of the hard disk. It comes with a lot of linux software such as system tools (parted, partimage, fstools, ...) and basic tools (editors, midnight commander, network tools). It requires no installation since you just have to boot on the CD-ROM. It can be used to perform admin tasks on both linux servers, linux desktops or windows boxes. The kernel supports most of the important file systems (ext2/ext3/ext4, reiserfs, reiser4, btrfs, xfs, jfs, vfat, ntfs, iso9660), as well as network filesystems (samba and nfs).