My rescue disk fails

["Mike O'Donnell" <odonnell@cs.uchicago.edu>]

I messed up my hard-disk installation due to stupid impatience trying
to upgrade from Debian 1.2 to Debian 1.3. Now, I am trying
unsuccessfully to get in with a rescue disk, and repair the damage.

I am using resc1440.bin and root.bin from

ftp://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/Debian-1.3/disks-i386/1997-05-30/

I also have drv1440.bin, but I don't understand what to do with it for
rescue purposes. I have plenty of memory, so lmemroot.bin shouldn't be
relevant. I wrote 3 diskettes containing resc1440.bin, root.bin,
drv1440.bin on another Linux system, using "dd".

I have booted from resc1440.bin: I have only one diskette drive. At
the boot prompt, I give the command

	rescue root=/dev/fd0

If I leave resc1440.bin in the drive (I have an impression that
resc1440.bin is supposed to contain a root, but I'm not sure of this),
the boot hangs with the final messages:

	VFS: Mounted root (msdos file system) readonly.
	Unable to open an initial console.

If I replace resc1440.bin by root.bin when prompted to load a root
disk, the boot hangs with the final message:

	Kernel Panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 02:00

If I try to mount root on the hard disk with

	rescue root=/dev/hda2

I get the message about the initial console.

The debug option to the boot doesn't appear to give any more useful
messages.

Thanks for any advice you can give.

Mike O'Donnell


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