Date: Mon, 27 Mar 1995 17:00:22 -0700 From: Nate Williams <nate@trout.sri.MT.net> To: kelly@fsl.noaa.gov (Sean Kelly), pascal@netcom.com Cc: questions@FreeBSD.org Subject: Fixit floppy ( was Re: question about dump) Message-ID: <199503280000.RAA03925@trout.sri.MT.net> In-Reply-To: kelly@fsl.noaa.gov (Sean Kelly) "Re: question about dump" (Mar 27, 4:33pm)
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> Richard> ( and this is a topic I'd like to see discussed more - > Richard> disaster recovery procedures for FreeBSD, the making of > Richard> standalone diskettes and the like ) > > Indeed. I have several users, including myself, who have quite a bit > of development effort done on my system, but the best I can come up > with for recovery is to boot with the original FreeBSD boot floppy, > reinstall, cpio floppy, escape to shell, and then restore from tape. > > It'd be nice if I could insert a floppy and then boot from it and into > a shell---or if space isn't permitting, boot the floppy and then > complete the boot from tape or CD-ROM, and then into a shell. How about booting from a floppy, and then doing a restore of your partition table and disklabel from there. After newfs'ing your FS's, you should be able to restore from your tape backup. (Not all of the steps need to be run, but it should be possible to run them all) I built something like this when I did my 1.1.5 -> 2.0 upgrade. I think the current fixit floppy contains most of what is needed for this, although it would be nice for the installation program to ask you if you want to create a fixit floppy at install time. If it were wanted, the install program would then prompt you for a new floppy, format it, newfs and disklabel it to make it bootable, and then dump a bunch of crunched/gzipped binaries onto it along with a copy of your partition, disklabel, and kernel. SCO does something similar to this at install time, and it's been a life-saver a couple of times. BTW - I'm not suggesting that anyone but me would do this, but if something like this were done I *think* it would be incredibly helpful if someone else felt like doing it. It should be fairly trivial to do, but it would require *MORE* disk space and/or another floppy completely that would need to be 'setup' once the install was complete. From a CD this would be a very easy thing to do. Is this interesting to anyone? Nate
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