Rescue CDROM

[Martin McCormick]

	I am happy to report that I got the system back, but not
without a fight.  I burned the jupiter.iso CD and then re-discovered
that the system in question had the wrong boot order setup in the
BIOS.  After I got someone to help me rearrange the boot order for the
dead system, the jupiter disk booted just fine but I couldn't seem to
get the serial port to talk to me or rather get it to send data to my
old P.C. with DOS and the screen reader.

	The jupiter disk sounds like a really neat system that I
should learn more about, so I will mess with that more later, but I
still needed a shell I could run to try to recover this Linux system I
had broken so well.

	I remembered that the Linux installation CD's have a shell one
can run so I tried that once again.

	For those on the list who want to install Linux via CDROM, you
can get a serial console going by booting from the CD, waiting for
your disk to stop spinning, and then typing the following line without
hitting any other keys:

linux console=/dev/ttyS0 9600,n,8,1

And your speech synthesizer terminal should come to life a few seconds
later.

	Anyway, I did that and got the Linux opening screen.  After
you get the opening message, you should hit r instead of choosing any
of the installation options.  That gives you a new menu in which one
of the choices is to run a shell.

	I ran the shell and tried to mount the primary boot partition.
This is the one I had accidentally tried to set up as swap.

	The system wouldn't let me mount it to save my soul.  Mount
kept giving me the error that I was using an invalid argument.

	The rescue system on the Debian CD I was using didn't have
fsck or vi.  It has an editor called nano which is small enough to fit
on a floppy.  If you like using strange editors on the most critical
files in your system which is already hurting, then go for it.  I
personally would like to have an environment that is somewhat familiar
to me so I can hope not to tear things up any worse than they already
are.

	As a long shot, I went to my good working Linux system and
built a floppy containing just vi and fsck which I then put on the
broken system.

	Vi wouldn't work because it needed different shared libraries
than were on the CD.  fsck, however, worked fine and I found out that
when I had set the wrong swap partition with mkswap, I had
effectively dismounted my / file system without syncing it.  That's
what really messed up the world.

	After running fsck and allowing it to restore all the right
block counts, it mounted like it should and I could see that fstab
hadn't been corrupted after all.

	The system booted and all is well now.

	I am wasting everyone's time on this list describing what
happened because you will all probably get yourselves in to a jam like
this somewhere along the way.  I was about ready to just give up and
re-install everything, but my laziness kept me hoping for a shorter
path and it worked out.

	When things are broken, the serial console is really our
friend if we can find some way to use a talking terminal.  It goes
without saying that my example above of how to activate the serial
console should be modified to fit your particular system so if your
only working serial port is /dev/ttyS1 or something like that, you put
that in to the device part of the command.

	Also, the mkswap command fortunately did not change the
partition types although I have no idea what it might do if you
specified more parameters other than the partition name.  One of you
can try that and tell us how it went.

	If you upgrade a kernel from 2.4x to 2.6, you have to run
mkswap -v1 on your swap partition to make the kernel happy.  That's
how I got this whole mess started.

Martin McCormick WB5AGZ  Stillwater, OK 
OSU Information Technology Division Network Operations Group

Karl Dahlke writes:
>http://www.eklhad.net/linux/jupiter
>Scroll down to the bottom of the page.
>You will find the cd image and documentation.