[5816] in RedHat Linux List
Re: Disaster disks?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Kenneth G. Kay)
Sun Nov 24 05:03:47 1996
From: "Kenneth G. Kay" <kay@kay.ch.biu.ac.il>
To: tyson@rwii.com
Date: Sun, 24 Nov 1996 11:58:13 +0200 (IST)
Cc: redhat-list@redhat.com
In-Reply-To: <ML-2.3.848679604.7457.tyson@falcon.rwii.com> from "Tyson D Sawyer" at Nov 22, 96 11:20:04 am
Resent-From: redhat-list@redhat.com
Reply-To: redhat-list@redhat.com
>
> > On Thu, 21 Nov 1996 16:43:02 -0700, you wrote:
> >
> > >Ah, but that only solves half the problem. Making a bootable floppy is
> > >easy. Making one which will allow you to fix a trashed hard disk is
> > >another story. There are all these packages which purport to make useful,
> > >floppy-based root filesystems, but they are all a major pain to figure out
> > >and use. Sigh.
> >
> > Yes exactly. I would like to see one bootable disk that had enough
> > tools for repairing a broken system or restoring from backup media.
> >
> > I have been fiddling around with yard, but I am not quite there yet.
> >
> > Dale
>
> One idea that I have seen mentioned before is having a duplicate root
> partitions and putting them on seperate drives if possible. Since
> only one root partition is mounted at any time only one should get
> trashed. I would recommend setting up lilo on the hard drive so that
> it can boot any of the root partitions and also having a boot disk
> with a kernel that can mount any of the root paritions.
>
> An other idea that I think is not yet mature is mounting the root
> partition read-only. This helps to prevent damage to it. In this
> case /tmp /usr /var and /home must all be on seperate partitions from
> / and /etc/mtab is made as a link to /proc/mounts. /proc/mounts isn't
> exaclty the same as /etc/mtab but I guess it is close enough. I have
> never tried this so there may be other catches that I have not thought
> of or read about.
>
> Of course if you want to modify anything in your root partition
> (most likely in /etc) you will need to remount / as rw, modify and
> then remount ro.
>
> Ty
Can't the installation boot disk (boot.img) in combination with
the CD-ROM or the supp.img disk, be used as a rescue disk? The idea would
be to interrupt the actual installation/update process before any changes
are actually made to the hard disk, hit Alt-F2 to access the virtual console
with the shell prompt, mount the hard disk partition, and the make whatever
changes that are necessary. Aren't the tools for this available during the
installation?
Ken
--
Kenneth G. Kay E-mail: kay@kay.ch.biu.ac.il
Department of Chemistry kay@gefen.cc.biu.ac.il
Bar-Ilan University Phone : +972-3-5318720
Ramat-Gan, Israel 52900 Fax : +972-3-5351250
--
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