SystemRescueCd Howto Advanced Customization
"This document describes how to customise and create a rescue CD. The rescue CD is based on http://www.sysresccd.org/ with a modified kernel to allow serial output to /dev/ttyS*. If you do not require a custom kernel, then the customization procedure as described in the System Rescue CDRom Manual will more than likely be adequate for your needs.
I have also implemented the grsecurity patches to give our setup a bit more robustness against buffer overflow attacks in the case that we want to enable a network connection while working on the remote machine. [...]
SystemRescueCd is a linux system on a bootable cdrom for repairing your system and your data after a crash. It also 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 contains a lot of system utilities (parted, partimage, fstools, ...) and basic ones (editors, midnight commander, network tools). It aims to be very easy to use: just boot from the cdrom, and you can do everything. The kernel of the system supports most important file systems (ext2/ext3, reiserfs, reiser4, xfs, jfs, vfat, ntfs, iso9660), and network ones (samba and nfs)."