The development way:

If you want to customize your TRK distribution, here ‘s my development virtual machine from where it all happens. This is the exact same way I make new builds.
It’s still the Mandriva 2005 on the outside, but evolved over the years and  it ‘s got the necessary tools to recreate the TRK3.4 iso. (current start build 367, with bugfix for LVM and ext4 in mountallfs)

To run it, you need VMWare workstation/server or something that can import and run a VMWare image.

Download this tarball TRKDev-vm.2010-23-10.tar.bz2 and unpack it on your host

Boot the VM. Root password is “trk”

Ok, cd /trkdev and execute ./mountloops

Now you can start modifying things.

The TRK filestructure is composed of two big elements: the initrd, the initial ramdisk which contains the root filesystem (and also /var) and the /usr, which on the livecd is a readonly (pseudo read/write thro ugh aufs2)compressed ramfilesystem pointing to /trk/trk3/trkramfs. In /trkdev this is everything living in /trkdev/linkedfs/

You will find the startup scripts in /trkdev/trkinitrd/etc/init.d

When you ‘re finished and you think you ‘re ready to make your own build: from /trkdev, type ./mknewbuild –b <3-character buildnumber>
Warning! Make sure all of your shells are out of /trkdev/trkinitrd, otherwise it cannot be unmounted and your build will most likely fail. Check it with lsof /trkdev/trkinitrd
This will create an iso file called trinity-rescue-kit-3.3-build-xxx.iso
Burn this file to a CD as an image, best use a CD/rw first to make sure it runs ok.

The simple, quick and dirty way:

Boot from your existing TRK 3.4, modify scripts, test them if you like and run updatetrk. This will put your updated scripts (from /bin, /sbin and /etc) back to a renewed ISO file. Check out the howto on usage of updatetrk. If you want to add files to everything in /usr, you need to use the old way, since the compressed ramfilesystem is read-only.