[vox-tech] Boot Disk Not a True Rescue

[Rob Rogers]

>      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?

But it does help if you compiled a new kernel, and overwrote the previous
one without backing it up, and it ends up being bad... Or what if
installed LILO improperly, and LILO hangs on bootup, now you've got a disk
for booting from... or you're dual booting between Linux and Windows, and
you have to do a windows reinstall, and it overwrites your MBR. Now you've
got a way to boot into linux to reinstall LILO.

The boot disk isn't exactly intended as a rescue disk, it's merely a disk
you can boot from. It used to be a much more useful thing. Older systems
had issues like not being able to boot from SCSI (often if it wasn't built
into the MB) without booting from a floppy to load the SCSI driver first,
or if you were dual booting between Windows and Linux, on a larger drive,
and your /boot partition wasn't within a certain area at the first part of
the drive, it wouldn't be bootable, so you needed a floppy to boot from.
Neither of these are usually issues anymore, and boot floppies are pretty
much an unnecessary thing anymore (aside from the "rescue" type floppy
sets like Tom's Root Boot and such which someone already sent a link to)