On Sun, 28 May 2000, Lorne Shantz wrote:
> Yup. It is very very very important to create a rescue disk!! That way
> if you mess up the partition and it no longer sees grub or LILO.... you
> can boot with it, type lilo at the bash prompt and you are done. That
> easy. Without the disk you have to go to a lot of trouble and know what
> you are doing to get back into it.
If you're refering to those floppy rescue disks Mandrake offers to create
during install, it's useless for solving the problem I was using as an
example. If the system is bootable using that rescue floppy, it's because
it was configured for your system. My problem was, once I plopped a new
PCI card in my company's webserver, it moved the address of the ide2
interface, which happens to be where the hard drive is, and Linux isn't
bootable on that machine unless the proper "ide2=<some address>" is
specified. Since both LILO and the rescue disk were configured for the
old address, neither was the slightest bit useful in bringing the system
back. I also tried tomsrtbt and it gave me some errors probably related
to the fact that tomsrtbt uses a crusty old kernel and libc. I ended up
creating a GRUB floppy. Now that I have it, I can boot any system with
it, no matter what happens to the MBR, the hardware addresses, or whatever.
I highly recommend keeping a GRUB floppy handy and learning the GRUB
command line if you're the kind of person who it in the position of having
to rescue downed computers from time to time. It's a very useful tool.
And, as Guillaume mentioned, it's got nice pretty menus. :) After the
aforementioned incident, I replaced LILO with GRUB on all my company's
computers, and people like it better this way.
