Live CD

A Live CD containing flashrom provides a user with a stable work environment to read, write and verify a flash device on any supported hardware.

It can help avoid Linux installation issues, which can be a hassle for some users.

Existing Live CDs with flashrom

flashrom is already shipped in the following Live CDs:

SystemRescueCd

• SystemRescueCd-x86-2.2.1 (flashrom 0.9.3-r1205)
• SystemRescueCd-2.3.0-beta007 (flashrom 0.9.3-r1205)

grml

• grml 2011.05 (flashrom 0.9.2+r1141-2)

Note: You need the regular grml ISO, the "medium" and "small" ISOs do not contain flashrom.

Parted Magic

• Parted Magic 6.7 (flashrom 0.9.4-r1394)

Hiren's BootCD

When you select "Linux based rescue environment (Parted Magic 6.1)" and then "Live with default settings" you have access to a system which has flashrom.

• Hiren's BootCD 14.0 (flashrom 0.9.2-r1141)

Custom flashrom Live CD (obsolete, unmaintained)

This is a work in progress. The current beta ISO based on Debian may be downloaded here: Flashrom Live_CD-Debian-0.1

Pre-built flashrom packages for various Linux distributions and scripts to build Flashrom Live-CDs are hosted at flashrom-live-cd.

Included software packages

• Linux kernel.
• Complete and automatic hardware detection, not requiring any driver to be added.
• Mounts $windows drive read only
• livecd/packages:
  • acpid, av, binutils, bison, busybox, bzip2, cabextract, cpio, curl, cvs, dev-util/git, dhcpcd, diffutils, dmidecode, dosfstools, ethtool, flex, ftp, gdb, grep, hwsetup, iputils, iproute, irssi, joe, lftp, livecd-tools, links, lsof, lynx, lzma-utils, mdadm, minicom, nano, ngrep, ntfsprogs, openssh, openvpn, pciutils, picocom, pptpclient, quilt, rp-pppoe, screen, strace, subversion, tar, telnet-bsd, tftp-hpa, unrar, valgrind, vim, wget, wireless-tools, wpa_supplicant, xc, zip

Complete toolchain for

• flashrom
• superiotool
• lspci

Size of ISO-image is <185 MBytes. Small enough to fit on a flash drive or 3" CD-ROM.