Need a rescue CD

I just burnt a MEPIS CD for rescue purposes and have had the
following problems:

1. It can't grok my weird S3 video card, so I'm stuck at low rez.
I have to get rid of that board, but I'm just out of money.
Anyone got a nice vanilla SVGA card, PCI or AGP, that I could
buy off you cheap? I'm not a gamer, so 3D and display speed are
not very important; but I do like 1200+ resolution.
I live at Thunderbird and SR51, and work at Raintree & 101 (Pima).

2. It can't open my network: VIA Rhine II Fast Ethernet Adaptor.

3. I can't see how to just get to a command prompt so I can
rearrange my partitions in prep for an install. (Does a nice
job of presenting all the drives though, including my NTFS
partition.)

4. OK, so what I really need is a nice rescue disk that will put
me in command at a root prompt. Don't need no stinkin GUI.
Would like a whole bunch of the usual command-line tools,
including parted and filesystem building tools.
Oh: and even maybe some man pages for those things? ;-)

Yeah, I've got my XP pretty well settled down, but I don't
like it very much. And I *hate* that all my old apps are
broken because the old registry is invalid. Microsoft totally
lost their mind when they went with that monolithic registry.
So I'm eager now to build a new Linux environment (replacing
my Red Hat 8) and start doing more of my work there.

I set up Thunderbird and Firefox to keep their stuff on
a Fat32 partition where I can share it from Linux.
That will be a major step towards letting me stay in Linux,
since I often had to switch back to Windows just to use
my mailbox and bookmarks there.

BTW, the CD I just made is SimplyMEPIS-2004.06. I'm also
interested in recommendations for other live CDs I should
try as I move towards my new setup. I'll have room to
set up several distros, and I have become a Grub wizard.

Thanks,

Vic
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