On Mon, 24 Oct 2005 12:03:50 +1000
Luke Mewburn <lukem@NetBSD.org> wrote:

> On Mon, Oct 24, 2005 at 11:55:35AM +1000, George Michaelson wrote:
>   | do we have room in the /boot code to add a brief one-liner
> sentence | documenting this as a fallback boot path? Something along
> the lines of: | 
>   | # use boot -a /rescue/init to fall back on merged-binary recovery
> tools
> 
> Possibly.
> It's arguable whether we need to do this; at what level do we need
> to provide advice such as this?

ok. I'm trying to think like a newbie. (and, with 25+ years of this
stuff, I am usually acting like a newbie anyway, the grey matter
doesn't work as well as it used to..)

So you have this NetBSD, and you rooted its disk. rototill. How do you
get it back? I know: lets ask google ... hang on.. you don't have
NetBSD working!! So how do you RTFM? haaaaaaa [clunk]

so a one-line boot msg to explain how to get to /rescue makes sense
from that POV: its to help you, in extremis. boot -s doesn't get you
there.

> 
> (You probably could have used the same ability to boot off the install
> CD-ROM.  Or did you only have an ISO of that, and not a real CD?)

I only had an .ISO. when I tried to explicitly set the boot> dev hd<x>:
value in the NetBSD boot prom, it didn't like to load from CD-ROM
backed on .iso image. If I left things alone, VMWare found the
CD-ROM .iso and booted from it fine. Strange.

-G