How to Put Rescatux or Super Grub2 Disk on a CD-ROM or USB Drive

Both tools are distributed as bootable disk images, and the supergrubdisk.org site provides dedicated instructions for writing each one to a CD-ROM or USB drive. The choice of medium is mostly about size and convenience: Rescatux is roughly 672 MB, so it fits comfortably on a CD or any USB stick of 1 GB or more, while Super Grub2 Disk is about 20 MB and is usually written to a small USB drive. You need the downloaded image file, a blank CD or a USB drive whose contents you can erase, and a way to write a raw image (a CD/DVD burning tool or an image-writing utility such as those commonly used for Linux ISOs).

What each tool is for

If your only problem is that the machine will not boot and you want to get back into an installed system, Super Grub2 Disk is the smaller, faster download. If you also need repair wizards, filesystem checks, or password and sudoers recovery, Rescatux is the fuller toolkit. The site's own wizards include "Restore Grub" and a howto for clearing a Windows password with Rescatux.

Before you start

• Download the image from the Download section of supergrubdisk.org (Rescatux Stable / Non-free Rescatux, and Super Grub2 Disk, which also has a Beta channel).
• Have a blank CD-R/CD-RW or a USB drive you can overwrite. For Rescatux, plan on at least the ~672 MB image size; for Super Grub2 Disk, ~20 MB.
• Make sure you can boot from the medium you create — you will need to select the CD or USB device in your firmware's boot menu when you use it.

Writing the image

The site keeps the exact procedures under its Howtos section, including "How to put Rescatux into a CDROM or a USB" and "How to put Super Grub2 Disk into a CDROM or a USB." Follow those pages for the current release rather than relying on remembered menu names, since the site is the authoritative source for each version.

The general pattern is the same for both tools:

1. CD-ROM: open your burning software, choose the option to burn a disc image (not to create a data disc from files), point it at the downloaded image, and burn.
2. USB drive: use an image-writing utility that writes the raw image to the device, select the USB drive as the target, and confirm. This erases everything currently on the drive.

The expected result in both cases is a bootable medium that starts Rescatux or Super Grub2 Disk when the machine boots from it.

Special boot situations

The Howtos also cover less common routes, which are worth checking if a normal USB write does not boot:

• Booting Super Grub2 Disk (EFI) from the Windows Boot Manager while the machine is booted in UEFI mode.
• A "fake hybrid" method for booting Super Grub2 Disk from a grub.cfg.

These are useful when firmware or an existing bootloader gets in the way of booting directly from the USB device.

Common snags

• The machine ignores the medium. Check that you actually wrote an image rather than copying the file onto a data disc or a FAT-formatted stick, and confirm the boot order or one-time boot menu in firmware.
• UEFI versus legacy boot. Rescatux's feature list emphasizes many UEFI boot options, and the Super Grub2 Disk release notes mention updated Debian and Ubuntu secureboot binaries for recent UEFIs — if a medium will not start on a newer machine, the UEFI/secure boot settings are the first thing to review.
• Wrong tool for the job. If you need to repair GRUB rather than just boot into a system, Rescatux's Restore Grub wizard is the intended path; Super Grub2 Disk is primarily about getting a system to boot.

For anything beyond the basics, the site's Documentation/Wiki, Boot Problems documentation, and forum are the places to continue.