On Tue, Dec 03, 2002 at 11:17:43AM -0500, Narins, Josh wrote: > Dear Debian folk, > Important Question... If my hard drive crashed, and my machine boots > from the hard drive, how far in the boot process would it get?
How long is a piece of string? > If I just messed up /etc/fstab (1), how can I fix it? > I've got some rescue disks, but NONE for any of my 2.4.x kernels. > They were all too big to fit on a floppy. They are for 2.2.x I recently managed to nuke my 2.4 system and booted it just fine from a 2.2 kernel floppy, made from the boot image on my Debian CD. I just ignore all the stuff about configuring the installation and go straight to "Execute a shell". I can then fsck /dev/hda4, mount /dev/hda4 /target and go into it and mess about. (Adjust dev appropriately for your system...) I can't, of course, use the boot floppy to make it boot from the HD. The boot floppy incorporates an editor "ae" with which you can fix /etc/fstab. Well, that's the theory. The version of "ae" on my boot floppy locks the system up if you try and run it. That's the slink one, you probably have a newer one which probably works. Try it out BEFORE you mount the HD otherwise you'll have to fsck it all over again. > After (IF?) this gets resolved, I'll have to learn to make a > bootable CD "rescue" disk. :) Even if you successfully resolve it without one? :-) > By the way, the boot goes for a while, obviously some modules are > being looked at, then I get a kernel panic, and the suggestion I pass root= > to tell it where to look for the hard drive. I don't think it's looking at any modules - how can it see them if it can't find the root? What messages does it give? > This happens with any of my kernels on the machine, or any of my > rescue disks. Is there a terminology confusion here? My "rescue disk" is a floppy made from resc1440.bin on my Debian CD. It boots - even if there are no hard drives in the machine at all - into a single-user mode whence you can either install Debian, or execute a shell in which to mount the hard drive and fix stuff. It doesn't try and look for anything on the hard drive while it's booting. > Thanks a ton, I'm really working hard to use Debian always. I love > the multiple-arches, I like viaducts too. Amazing to think they were all built by hand. > I love apt-get and dselect, but it ALWAYS seems like I > am having one trouble or the other :) Whereas in Windoze, either you can't fix the problems, or you can fix them but you have to do so time and again because the OS keeps re-breaking them. > (1) trying to swtich from /cdrom to /cdrom0 and /cdrom1, maybe I > accidentally edited the wrong line, also? Could be... Pigeon -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
