On Fri, Aug 30, 2002 at 11:34:17AM +0100, Richard Earnshaw wrote:
> That needn't be true, but then you need more than just /rescue.
> 
> My netwinder has a completely separate 'rescue' partition, that has a 
> kernel and a minimal set of tools.  The idea is that you *never* update 
> that (or only very rarely); you never mount it normally either.  Then when 
> things really go pear shaped you tell the BIOS to boot from that instead 
> of the normal partition and mount your screwed up world on that so that 
> you can fix it all up.
> 
> The main advantage of that approach is that it avoids some of the cases 
> where you've screwed up /dev, say, and can nolonger boot from your main 
> partition at all.  But the cost is more disk space since you need a 
> kernel, /etc, and other bits and bobs on it.
> 
> It's sort of like a 'floppy on the hard disk'.

I keep the install kernel (the one with the ramdisk) in / for this purpose.
As long as you can load the kernel you're OK.
Now one could create a separate, small partition to keep the ramdisk
kernel, to be really really safe.

--
Manuel Bouyer, LIP6, Universite Paris VI.           Manuel.Bouyer@lip6.fr
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