A bit of forethought

Hi All,

I'd like to pass on to you something that just recently bit me pretty good.

After just recently converting my ext2 partitions to ext3, and installing kernel 2.4.17, I figured I was pretty fat dumb and sassy.

Well, one morning, towards the end of last week, I was rebooting my box and the system gave me a VFS kernel panic. The very idea. Well, to make a long story short, in short order, I made my / partition completely unusable. So, since I wanted to relayout my disks, I just did a new install.

I did find out, though, during my troubleshooting, that I could have had, at my disposal, a rescue disk, similiar to that used in MS Windows, that provides the tools to correct just this type of problem.

So, I'm suggesting to you all, to make sure that you not only have a current boot disk at the ready, but also a rescue disk too. Now your milage may vary with model, but the commands to make these floppies in Debian are 'mkboot' and 'mkrescue'. So you'll have to find out what these command functions are called in your distro. Good luck. -mk

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If it ain't broke,
Fix it till it is.

On my primary Linux system, I've opted to not have a floppy. I use floppies but my goal was to get familiar with the os without the need for a floppy. Floppies are moving their way out of the mainstream and are now considered an option on some OEM builds.
My goal is to build a system that a relative could use without a floppy since they're never used anyway. 1.4 meg files are allowed on most Email servers so the users would just Email the file to themselves if needed.

Couldn't these repairs be done with the CD boot disk just like Win2000? I've repaired many Win2000 servers from the CD boot from the command line.

There are several "Live" CD Rom Distributions, which you can use to boot AND run linux directly. At the very minimum these could be used as rescue CD's. The two that come to mind are SuSE's and Slackware's. I have tried SuSe's but it was too slow in my old junker, and it also puts a few files in the first fat partition it finds (swap, settings, etc: ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/live-eval-7.3/ ). I don't think the Slackware one is available for download (and I have not tried it at any rate), but it may be worth the price to buy it along with the distro as a show of support.

With Debian the images for the rescue disk etc are on the cd, so you can make the floppies from within windows too. I rescued one of my machines this way when I stuffed up the kernel/bootloader and found my boot floppy was no good.