There are different kinds of disasters you may need to recover from.  At R1Soft we consider any situation requiring you to take your server offline to restore to be considered disaster recovery and we call this Bare-Metal Restore.  You usually want to perform a Bare-Metal Restore any time you need to restore more than just a handful of files.

Righteous Software provides a CD-ROM ISO image available for download.  These are also referred to as Live CDs.  This ISO image can be burned to a CD-ROM using a CD burner and any common CD burning software.  You can request CD’s from Righteous by asking your sales representative.
Advantages:

• Easy to use.
• Nothing required other than a Boot CD and CD-ROM.

Disadvantages:

• Requires physical access to the computer to insert the CD-ROM.
• Can not be easily automated or initiated remotely.

Live Boot

Righteous Software invented Live Boot as a way to overcome the challenges with performing a bare-metal restore in a remote data center where there is no physical access and PXE boot is not an option.  Live Boot is currently only available for Linux.
 Advantages:

• Easy to use. 
• Great for people renting dedicated servers.
• No physical access is required.
• No PXE boot required.
• Adds a permanent Grub/Lilo boot loader entry for disaster recovery.

Disadvantages:

Righteous Software provides a .tar.gz archive containing all the files needed for PXE boot.  PXE Boot is a great option for data center automation.  With PXE Boot and Righteous CDP Server it is possible to provide a hands-free fully automated disaster recovery and re-deployment system for the entire data center.

PXE boot is comprised of three components:

• Special NIC card support for PXE Boot.  If your NIC does not support PXE boot then you can not use PXE boot.
• DHCP Server.  PXE Boot requires a DHCP server to assign the NIC card an IP address and specify a boot image to download and load. 
• TFTP Server.  The NIC card will download a special PXE boot loader using TFTP.  That boot loader will use TFTP to download the kernel and initrd (initial ram disk) file.

Advantages:

• Can be completely automated. 
• Requires no physical access.
• Only a working NIC and PXE boot system is required.

Disadvantages:

• Complex to setup.  Requires specialized knowledge in setting up and maintaining DHCP, and TFTP.
• The DHCP and TFTP server usually must be deployed in the same data center.

Custom Boot Media

You can certainly use any Boot CD or Live CD you would like to perform a disaster recovery.  The only special requirement is that you install the Linux Agent and start it in disaster recovery mode (-r).  This installation can take place as something permanently installed and burned into your own Boot CD.