On Tue, 6 Oct 1998, Ted Gervais wrote:
> On Tue, 6 Oct 1998 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> >
> > On Tue, 6 Oct 1998 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> >
> > > I was wondering the proper way to making up a rescue disk. I have a boot
> > > disk for linux such that it will boot up to a certain point and then asks
> > > for 'something' to mount and if you have nothing, then that is where you
> > > stay.
> >
> > Slackware, and, I suppose, most of the distributions, has a boot-rescue
> > system right on the distribution CDROM. Just rawrite it to two floppies.
>
> You are right. 'rawrite' is there. I tried it and the system wouldn't boot
> with it. And it only made ONE floppy. Not two?? I first tried it using
> EMUdos, and then I booted up DOS and tried it that way - right from the
> CDROM, but the first time I just entered the commands manually and the
> second time I let the rescue.bat file do it.
>
> In either case - things just stopped at the bootup ; never going passed
> the floppy. Obviously I have done something wrong. I wonder what that
> could be.??
>
> Oh - I should mention....this system I am doing this on is ok. Nothing
> wrong here, but there is another one that is sick that I (we) are trying
> to get to...
>
> > I'm not absolutely sure of this, but, at least in Slackware, the one made
> > at the time of installation will _not_ do for rescue. It plans to boot
> > the system and mount the stuff on hard disk. But this may not work if the
> > disk is corrupted somehow.
>
> Yes. I believe that is right. That is why I am trying to make a TRUE
> rescue disk to be ready for now and the future...
> >
Again, on the Walnut Creek CDROM (and on the sunsite slackware
distribution) there are two disks that must be made. The first one, the
"boot" disk is in the bootdsks.144/ directory of the CDROM. This is the
same whether you intend installing or rescuing. When this is used to
boot, it should ask for the switch of the "root" floppy into the drive and
press enter. If it does not ask for a root disk then you are
probably using the boot disk made during installation. This will not do.
If you did not do the original installation starting with floppies, then
you will need to go through the selection procedure outlined in the file
WHICH_ONE.
The root disks are in the directory rootdsks/ and have names like color.gz
for standard installation or rescue.gz for obvious purposes. The files on
rescue.gz are read into a mounted ramdisk file system and contain copies
of vi, lilo, e2fsck, and the like, useful for repairing your system. The
important thing is that the hard disk is not automatically mounted and
e2fsck may be run on it. After fsck is happy with the file system you may
then mount it by hand and effect any necessary repair to the file systems
with vi. This may not replace everything that was damaged, but, it is
hoped, will allow you to bring up the system hard disk normally so that
damaged files may be reinstalled.
Good Luck,
Gordon A. Gallup Dept. of Physics and Astronomy
University of Nebraska-Lincoln Lincoln, NE 68588-0111
Voice: (402)472-1230 FAX: (402)472-2879
http://www.unl.edu/physics/
