John Summerfield wrote:
You could also contemplate booting & running from CD. Is there a CentOS-Live? If not, there is Fedora-Live, and you could also base from Knoppix (first, remove almost everything) or Damn Small Linux (Knoppix with almost everything removed, but some additions).
There is, in fact a CentOS 4.4 Live CD:
ftp://mirrors.kernel.org/pub/centos/4.4/isos/i386/CentOS-4.4-i386-LiveCD.iso