To boot your system in rescue mode, boot from a Red Hat Linux boot disk or the Red Hat Linux CD-ROM #1, and enter the following command at the installation boot prompt:
boot: linux rescue |
You can get to the installation boot prompt in one of these ways:
By booting your system from an installation boot diskette made from the boot.img image. This method requires that the Red Hat Linux CD-ROM #1 be inserted as the rescue image or that the rescue image be on the hard drive as an ISO image. [1]
By booting your system from the Red Hat Linux CD-ROM #1.
By booting from a network disk made from the bootnet.img or PCMCIA boot disk made from pcmcia.img. You can only do this if your network connection is working. You will need to identify the network host and transfer type. For an explanation of how to specify this information, refer to the Official Red Hat Linux Installation Guide.
After booting off a boot disk or Red Hat Linux CD-ROM #1 and providing a valid rescue image, you will see the following message:
The rescue environment will now attempt to find your Red Hat Linux installation and mount it under the directory /mnt/sysimage. You can then make any changes required to your system. If you want to proceed with this step choose 'Continue'. You can also choose to mount your filesystem read-only instead of read-write by choosing 'Read-only'. If for some reason this process fails you can choose 'Skip' and this step will be skipped and you will go directly to a command shell. |
If you select Continue, it will attempt to mount your filesystem under the directory /mnt/sysimage. If it fails to mount a partition, it will notify you. If you select Read-Only, it will attempt to mount your filesystem under the directory /mnt/sysimage, but in read-only mode. If you select Skip, your filesystem will not be mounted. Choose Skip if you think your filesystem is corrupted.
Once you have your system in rescue mode, a prompt appears on VC
(virtual console) 1 and VC 2 (use the
sh-2.05a# |
If you selected Continue to mount your partitions automatically and they were mounted successfully, you are in single-user mode.
To mount a Linux partition manually inside rescue mode, create a directory such as /foo, and type the following command:
mount -t ext3 /dev/hda5 /foo |
In the above command, /foo is a directory that you have created and /dev/hda5 is the partition you want to mount. If the partition is of type ext2, replace ext3 with ext2.
If you do not know the names of your partitions, use the following command to list them:
fdisk -l |
If your filesystem is mounted and you want to make your system the root partition, use the command chroot /mnt/sysimage. This is useful if you need to run commands such as rpm that require your root partition to be mounted as /. To exit the chroot environment, type exit, and you will return to the prompt.
From the bash# prompt, you can run many useful commands including:
anaconda gzip mkfs.ext2 ps badblocks head mknod python bash hwclock mkraid python1.5 cat ifconfig mkswap raidstart chattr init mlabel raidstop chmod insmod mmd rcp chroot less mmount rlogin clock ln mmove rm collage loader modprobe rmmod cp ls mount route cpio lsattr mpartition rpm dd lsmod mrd rsh ddcprobe mattrib mread sed depmode mbadblocks mren sh df mcd mshowfat sync e2fsck mcopy mt tac fdisk mdel mtools tail fsck mdeltree mtype tar fsck.ext2 mdir mv touch fsck.ext3 mdu mzip traceroute ftp mformat open umount gnome-pty-helper minfo pico uncpio grep mkdir ping uniq gunzip mke2fs probe zcat |
| [1] | To create an installation boot diskette, insert a blank floppy disk and use the images/boot.img file on the Red Hat Linux CD-ROM #1 with the command dd if=boot.img of=/dev/fd0. |