Linux

What I have been doing for some time now is installing linux on my tech machine at work, plugging in devices and transferring data with dd_rescue.

What I need now is a version of linux that I can install on a laptop sata hard drive and be able to plug it into any machine to transfer data off of raids which wont work in my tech machine.

Example and problem:

I've got a DELL pci raid card with 3 striped 80 gig sata hard drives in it. The motherboard that it was installed on went bad. I need to be able to get the data off the drives and onto another hard drive. I believe this is possible because the 3 drives show up as 1 150ish gig hard drive when I boot to the linux mint, fedora, and ubuntu live cds. What the problem is is when I try to get the computer to boot off my fully updated and installed linux hard drive it wont mount the file system. /root/dev/sdb. The only thing it does is "crash" to busybox (which I am beginning to hate seeing.)

Does anyone know if I can install puppylinux, or DSL or another flavor of linux on a laptop hard drive that I can plug into almost ANY system, boot it, and use dd_rescue?

I'd just keep using mint, but for some reason it wont boot. Which is quite surprising to me

The gentoo minimal live CD's are quite useful and have lots of drivers these days. They boot you directly to a BASH prompt. They don't come with dd_rescue, but 'dd conv=noerror,sync if=/dev/input-drive of=/dev/output-drive' ought to do the trick.