zImage rescue disk?

[George Bonser <grep@shorelink.com>]

I just had a bad experiance with a system that will not boot a bzimage
kernel. Debian does not seem to produce a rescue disk with a zImage kernel
any longer. It took me almost 3 days to get this system put back together
though a zImage rescue disk would have saved a lot of time. Real tar on
root.bin and libs capable of restoring pipes would have helped a lot too.

In short, my experiance boiled down to this, tar the partially corrupt 
root partition to a file on another drive, copy a zImage kernel to
/linux on a rescue disk, boot: ramdisk0, copy real tar and some libs to
another floppy. Mount the other floppy. mke2fs on the old partition, use
the tar to restore the tar image except it blows up when restoring pipes
(cant mkpipe) so go through a few iterations of adding files to an exclude
file to be made later by hand.

In short, it really sucked and I seemed to be thwarted at every turn by a
lack of a rescue disk that 1) my system would boot and 2) would actually
allow you to restore a tar image.

Yeah, I know, I need to get rid of that motherboard and I will, but it
really sucks that there is no zImage kernel rescue disk for these systems.

George Bonser

The Linux "We're never going out of business" sale at an FTP site near you!