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Date: Wed, 8 Mar 1995 23:15:13 +1000
From: Bruce Evans <bde@zeta.org.au>
Message-Id: <199503081315.XAA12432@godzilla.zeta.org.au>
To: current@FreeBSD.org, sysseh@devetir.qld.gov.au
Subject: Re: Repair floppies - what should we have?
Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.org
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

Remounting of a different floppy on the same drive doesn't work, so the
prompt would have to be given before mounting root.

>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.

I use one with all binaries (except ld.so of course) linked *shared* and
compressed.

>3)	The libraries floppy - a tarred floppy with all the important dynamic
>	libraries on it.

I can barely fit enough libraries for /bin and /sbin on a 1200K floppy.

>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?

Just boot off any floppy with a kernel and switch to one with a more useful
root fs while the probes are running.

Bruce