[vox-tech] Boot Disk Not a True Rescue

[Mark Street]

A boot disk != rescue disk.

I believe Debian 3 uses CD Disk #7 as their rescue disk.  Red Hat uses CD #1, 
and if you want a nice set of tools and all the goodies to boot use Knoppix.

man mkbootdisk

mkbootdisk  creates  a  boot floppy appropriate for the running system.
       The boot disk is  entirely  self-contained,  and  includes  an  initial
       ramdisk  image  which  loads any necessary SCSI modules for the system.
       The created boot disk looks for the root filesystem on the device  sug-
       gested by /etc/fstab.  The only required argument is the kernel version
       to put onto the boot floppy.

On Sunday 30 November 2003 12:53, Edwin P. Groot wrote:
>      Hi there,
>      Hope you guys can solve something that's been bothering me.  I am
> using a Debian 3 distribution as a workstation at work, and I had made the
> boot floppy during the installation process.  I tested this boot floppy for
> safety's sake, and it says it will mount root from /dev/sda1.  It not only
> does that, but starts the init process on that partition, starting up my
> workstation in the usual way.
>      Now what use is that floppy if that partition is damaged, or I hosed
> some files while recompiling the kernel?  At the boot: prompt on this
> floppy I entered
> linux.bin root=/dev/fd0
> and it says "VFS: Insert root floppy and press ENTER" after starting the
> kernel.  I simply hit Enter because all I have is a boot floppy, but the
> kernel became panicky and halted.  In my opinion this floppy is not playing
> with a full deck of cards.  Where do I get a root floppy with tools to
> repair with when things go wrong?

-- 
Mark Street, D.C.
Red Hat Certified Engineer
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