Several packages for creating rescue disks are available on
www.ibiblio.org. With these packages you specify a set of files for inclusion
and the software automates (to varying degrees) the creation of a bootdisk.
See http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/system/recovery/!INDEX.html
for more information. Check the file dates carefully.
Some of these packages have not been updated in several years and will not
support the creation of a compressed root filesystem loaded into ramdisk. To
the best of our knowledge, Yard is the only
package that will.