Re: Help - I hosed myself! Owwww dearrrr

["Karen Ellrick" <k-ellrick sctech co jp>]

> Right suggestions
> Create some new boot floppies or rather floppy ? dd from the image on the
> install cd
What would I do differently from what I did when I made the first ones?  And
what is a dd image (sorry for dumb questions)?  I already tried two
different boot floppies, with the same result.  I don't even know how to
make a boot floppy without doing a complete install, and I have no spare
servers to work with (if I did, I would probably try putting this hard disk
in one of them and try mounting it and fixing my directories - that thought
had occurred to me).  But the other two servers we have are in full-time
use - I'm not at liberty to take them off-line to install extra hard drives
temporarily without a really good reason.  I would reinstall Linux before
doing that.

> Boot from the cdrom !
Sorry, can't - this hardware (BIOS) is too old to allow that.  Nice idea,
though!

Ah, just as I was about to send this, a note from Jens Kerle came in:
>better solution would be a rescue disk, which runs by itself, and not boot
>into the sticky system
>get a rescue disk from freshmeat.net -> minidistributions
>or my favorite, the debian rescue disk (i know, this is redhat list:)

I pulled down the freshmeat one (actually on SourceForge, called byld-1.0),
and started to follow the instructions, but it says to compile the kernel
first by doing the following:
  cd to the (empty) .../byld-1.0/linux directory
  # cp ../.config-2.2.5 ./.config
  # make menuconfig
  # make dep
  ...etc.

I don't know much about compiling kernels (have done it once, and the
resulting machine wouldn't boot!), but the above instructions didn't work -
got "No rule to make <whatever>".  I do know that it takes a Makefile to do
a make, but there are a kazillion files called Makefile on the machine I am
using, including several that are in directories that look potentially
related to kernels - which one do I use?  I guess the instructions assume
one knows how to compile a kernel, but I got the impression that I was
supposed to be in that almost-empty directory so that the resulting kernel
would go there (how many of you are laughing at my ignorance?).  Should I
give up and see if the Debian one has better instructions?  Or can someone
guide me through this process?

Karen