Just a word to the newbies (or the oldies as well) among us, if you don't already have a copy of the linuxcare bootable cdrom (www.linuxcare.com), get one soonest. It's the greatest thing since sliced bread. You can even download and burn it from Windows. If you ever reach the point where you can't boot a linux system you'll be glad to have it. You can boot linuxcare on just about any imaginable pc and use it to do needed maintenance. It even supports your lan (dhcp) and offers lynx for browsing the web. Probably ftp as well, but I haven't checked that out. If you have framebuffer support in your kernel, you can even start X
Another thing you'll want as a part of your toolkit is a grub boot floppy (see the SXS for that). Yes I know LILO is preferred by many and grub is a royal pain, but LILO is pretty much worthless in an emergency situation, because you can't regenerate it's choices on the fly without having everything mounted and from a runnable linux partition. I've just spent a couple of weeks monitoring mail from Outlook, since I had to install Win98 after the fact which predictably trashed my mbr. Now that I found the time to do the repairs, it was quite simple: 1) boot from linuxcare. 2) mount the grub floppy and update the menu.lst. If you've forgotten the kernel names, you can mount those partitions to take a peek. Grub doesn't even care that I have some old boot stanzas from another machine in the menu.lst. Umount the floppy. 3) Boot a runnable linux with grub installed using the floppy (gentoo in my case) 4) Mount the partition that is going to be constant (hda1 - Win98 in my case), create /boot/grub directories, and copy all the /boot/grub files to this new directory, mount the grub boot floppy and copy its menu.lst to the new directory (or update the menu.lst as required) 5) grub, root (hd0,0), setup (hd0), quit, umount everything and reboot 6) Now you're back in business. gentoo even adds a pretty splash screen for grub. 6) If you take my approach (using the Windows partition for storage of the /boot/grub files), be aware that you will need to repeat this process if you ever defrag the Windows disk. Whereas LILO neets to know the exact hard coded locations of all kernels, the only location dependancy in grub is the location of the grub files. Now I'm back to elx, and I don't have to suffer through Uncle Bill's Outlook monstrosity to get mail. -- Collins Richey - Denver Area WWTLRD? - ELX rc1 with xfce and sylpheed _______________________________________________ Linux-users mailing list - http://linux-sxs.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-users Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Archives,and Digests are located at the above URL.
