PAUD - Parted And Utilities Disk

PAUD is a disk image that contains system utilities, such as fdisk, mc (midnight commander), parted, ntfsresize, and more. PAUD is ideal for rescue/administration purposes and transferring files from one filesystem to another for windows users.

Note: Due to the shrinking popularity of floppy drives, PAUD is no longer under development and 2.0.3 is the last version. Please consider other options such as a Live CD or a flash drive distribution which can do what PAUD does plus much more.

Features

The latest version of PAUD (2.0.3) has glibc-2.2.5, kernel 2.4.20, support for up to 4 virtual consoles. Kernel has DMA support (enabled with hdparm). SCSI support is also available with an optional expansion floppy. FAT/VFAT, ext2, ext3, and reiserfs v3 are supported in the kernel. NTFS is also supported via command-line utilities.

Here is a list of all the commands, some of thses are internel commands of busybox:

[, ash, basename, busybox, cat, chgrp, chmod, chown, chroot, chvt, clear, cp, cut, date, dd, df, dirname, dmesg, du, echo, env, false, find, free, grep, gunzip, gzip, halt, head, id, init, kill, killall, klogd, ln, logger, ls, lsmod, mkdir, mknod, mkswap, modprobe, more, mount, mv, pidof, poweroff, ps, pwd, reboot, reset, rm, rmdir, sed, sh, sleep, sort, swapoff, swapon, sync, syslogd, tail, tar, test, touch, true, tty, umount, uname, uniq, uptime, wc, which, whoami, xargs, yes, zcat

cfdisk, fdisk, hdparm, mc, ntfscat, ntfsls, ntfsresize, parted

insmod, kallsyms, ksyms, lsmod, modprobe, reiserfsck, rmmod

3w-xxxx.o, 53c7,8xx.o, AM53C974.o, BusLogic.o, NCR53c406a.o, a100u2w.o, aacraid.o, advansys.o, aha152x.o, aha1542.o, aha1740.o, aic7xxx.o, aic7xxx_old.o, atp870u.o, cdrom.o, cpqfc.o, dmx3191d.o, dpt_i2o.o, dtc.o, eata.o, eata_dma.o, eata_pio.o, fdomain.o, g_NCR5380.o, gdth.o, in2000.o, initio.o, ips.o, megaraid.o, ncr53c8xx.o, pas16.o, pci2000.o, pci2220i.o, psi240i.o, qla1280.o, qlogicfas.o, qlogicfc.o, qlogicisp.o, scsi_mod.o, sd_mod.o, seagate.o, sim710.o, sr_mod.o, st.o, sym53c416.o, sym53c8xx.o, sym53c8xx.o, t128.o, tmscsim.o, u14-34f.o, ultrastor.o, wd7000.o

Notes

expansion floppy: The expansion floppy contains reiserfsck and SCSI kernel modules. Please note that the expansion floppy is optional (the first floppy will function alone).

NTFS: NTFS support is available via command-line utilities. 'ntfsls' is used to list files. 'ntfscat' is used to copy files (specify '>outfile' to copy to a file instead of stdout). 'ntfsresize' resizes the filesystem. Note: it resizes the filesystem only, you need to resize the partition manually using fdisk/cfdisk; don't use fdisk unless you are sure of what you are doing as you could make the data inaccessible.

ReiserFS: Run 'reiserfsck --fix-fixable' (either from PAUD or your main OS) after modifying any reiserfs filesystems from parted, to fix any potential problems.

Ext3: parted cannot create ext3 filesystems. If you would like to create one, first create an ext2 partition from parted, then create a journal to convert it to ext3 with 'tune2fs -j' (not included with PAUD).

hdparm/DMA: DMA isn't enabled by default, 'hdparm' allows you to enable DMA using the '-d1' option.

mc: 'mc' is a great way of transferring files between filesystems (for Windows/DOS users) or for editing files if you need to. It can also be useful if you ever need to use PAUD for rescue purposes.

mounting: If you get an error when mounting that a filesystem cannot be found on the device, a different filesystem may have been found. Type 'mount' to see if it was actually mounted or not.

Downloading

If you are using Windows NT/2000/XP, use rawritent to write the file to disk. If you are in DOS/9x/ME, use rawrite (rename file to 8.3 format first). You can obtain these from the download page.

If you would like to build a distribution similar to PAUD, download and extract 'paudscripts-2.0.3.tar.gz', then read the README file.

Links

Support / Contact

First thing to check if you are having problems is if the file was written to the floppy correctly. You can check the md5sum with:

replace X with the size of the file that you wrote and /dev/fd0 with your floppy device. Compare the value with the following:

If it differs, check the md5sum of the file to confirm it is not corrupt, then try a different floppy disk.
On windows you would not be able to do this and would just have to try writing to different floppy disks.

If you still have problems, bugs, comments, or need to contact me, you may do so through my email:
nehalmistry@gmx.net