From owner-freebsd-hackers Tue Mar 7 22:52:12 1995 Return-Path: hackers-owner Received: (from majordom@localhost) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.10/8.6.6) id WAA15832 for hackers-outgoing; Tue, 7 Mar 1995 22:52:12 -0800 Received: from bunyip.cc.uq.oz.au (bunyip.cc.uq.oz.au [130.102.2.1]) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.10/8.6.6) with SMTP id WAA15824; Tue, 7 Mar 1995 22:52:02 -0800 Received: from cc.uq.oz.au by bunyip.cc.uq.oz.au id <28581-0@bunyip.cc.uq.oz.au>; Wed, 8 Mar 1995 16:47:49 +1000 Received: from netfl15a.devetir.qld.gov.au by pandora.devetir.qld.gov.au (8.6.10/DEVETIR-E0.3a) with ESMTP id QAA26882; Wed, 8 Mar 1995 16:13:05 +1000 Received: from localhost by netfl15a.devetir.qld.gov.au (8.6.8.1/DEVETIR-0.1) id GAA15627; Wed, 8 Mar 1995 06:10:22 GMT Message-Id: <199503080610.GAA15627@netfl15a.devetir.qld.gov.au> X-Mailer: exmh version 1.5.3 12/28/94 To: current@FreeBSD.org cc: hackers@FreeBSD.org Subject: Repair floppies - what should we have? Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Date: Wed, 08 Mar 1995 16:10:20 +1000 From: Stephen Hocking Sender: hackers-owner@FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk Recently a crash in the middle of a make world trashed my libc.so, and this caused me to think long and hard about the issue of repair floppies. What I came up with was this - 1) A boot floppy with only a kernel and enough support to tell you to stick another floppy (the repair root fs) in the drive. This floppy should have your last OK kernel on it (particularly if you have some sort of weird hardware config that is not supported by the installation floppy). 2) The tools floppy. A root filesystem with the usual stuff, linked *statically* - /bin/sh, mount, fsck, disklabel, fdisk, tar, ed, cat, cp, mv, ln, ifconfig (any other candidates?). The system would come up on this and toss you into a shell. 3) The libraries floppy - a tarred floppy with all the important dynamic libraries on it. Anybody else got ideas? And, how do I persuade something to boot a kernel off one floppy and prompt me to insert a root fs? Stephen I do not speak for the Worker's Compensation Board of Queensland - They don't pay me enough for that!