rescue disks

rescue disks

[John Covici]

Hi.  I am wondering if anyone can tell me how to make a rescue disk
similar to that of Redhat.  

I am interested in that one because its the system I have and the boot
disk is a DOS disk andit has the interesting capability of mounting
another disk to take its place.  I, of course, want to put some kind
of speech on it as well as some backup software, etc.

I am wondering in particular about the ldlinux.sys, the bootup process
for that disk and what's in the disk image initrd.img.

Any assistance or pointers to any existing documentation on such
things will be appreciated.

-- 
         John Covici
          covici@ccs.covici.com

Re: rescue disks

[Hans Zoebelein]

Where to get infos about rescue disks:
There is a Bootdisk.HOWTO which has some information about boot disks.

Scripts to build boot/rescue disks:
To build a boot/rescue disk you also can find scripts at
sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/system/recovery/

It should be possible to make a bigger set of say 3 boot disks which load 
special software into memory (ram disk) before the system is booted.

What is initrd.img?
In earlier times a Linux distribution had to deliver a gazillion of
different kernels which had support for different hardware compiled in.
Or they had to compile a real fat kernel which supported every possible
hardware. But now you possibly had problems since some hardware support
was mutually exclusive.

Now a Linux distribution can install one 'naked' kernel, which holds
only basic floppy support. Everything else is packed into modules.
Vital modules like support for SCSI controllers are packed into initrd.img 
(=initial ram disk image). Initrd.img is loaded into a ram disk at boot
time and is accessible from the beginning.
Intitrd.img is created through /sbin/mkinitrd script. 
 
Enjoy!
Hans

On Sun, 19 Apr 1998, John Covici wrote:

> Hi.  I am wondering if anyone can tell me how to make a rescue disk
> similar to that of Redhat.  
> 
> I am interested in that one because its the system I have and the boot
> disk is a DOS disk andit has the interesting capability of mounting
> another disk to take its place.  I, of course, want to put some kind
> of speech on it as well as some backup software, etc.
> 
> I am wondering in particular about the ldlinux.sys, the bootup process
> for that disk and what's in the disk image initrd.img.
> 
> Any assistance or pointers to any existing documentation on such
> things will be appreciated.
> 
> -- 
>          John Covici
>           covici@ccs.covici.com
> 
> ---