[SGVLUG] Is there a rescue floppy that works?

[David Lawyer]

A couple days ago I lost access to both my hard-drives due to a
corrupted boot-loader  It happened firstly due to my wife pulling the
plug when I was defragmenting the fs on one of these drives.  This
corrupted the book loader on this drive.  How the other got corrupted
I don't know, but it's likely due to a mistake I made while running
lilo trying to fix the first drive.

One problem is that what lilo does depends on whether or not you're in
a chroot jail.  Lilo (a boot-loader installer like grub) uses
/etc/lilo.conf as it's configuration file, and if you put yourself in a
chroot jail it will also use /etc/lilo.conf but it will not be the
same file since the / is in a different location.  For example you can
make /mnt be / and then only what is in the /mnt tree is visible.  So
I was not sure at one time whether I was still in the chroot jail when
I ran lilo.

So what do you do to be able to boot at least one of the hd's?  You
use either a bootable cd or floppy.  But unfortunately, there's a
software problem (bug) for my brand of cd which Debian never fixed,
although someone else also reported the same problem.  So I tried to
use rescue floppies and none of them worked.

Firstly, the lilo programs on the floppies was too old and wouldn't
work.  Secondly, I tried to create a chroot jail so I could run a
recent version of lilo that's on my hd.  But that didn't work either,
both using Debian rescue floppies and tomsrtbt.  Not only that, but the
floppy's took an extremely long time to figure out that my hd was on
the secondary cable (hdc) and kept looking for it as hda. (My primary
hd interface is electronically broken).

With tomsrtbt I got the error message: "Fatal: kernel too old" when I
tried to use chroot.  This means that the 2.2. kernel on this floppy
was too old to support certain software on the same floppy: the
command "chroot" or likely it's libraries.  The message comes from the
loader for the shared libraries that chroot uses to put the libraries
it needs into memory from the hd.  I also tried 2 Debian rescue disks
that didn't work either.  One for Debian Sarge had a /dev directory
with no hd devices in it so I couldn't even gain access to my hd's my
mounting them.

I finally got into my hd and did a chroot successfully by installing
the hd as a secondary drive in an old 486 computer that I've been
intending to give away.  It's kernel version is even older than the
one on tomsrtbt but at least chroot works.  When I searched for rescue
floppies on the Internet, the most popular one seems to be tomsrtbt,
but even though I have the latest version of it, chroot didn't work
and it's not being maintained anymore.  So where do I find a good
rescue floppy?  I guess I could look some more on the internet.  If I
could get my CD to work I could use say knoppix.

So even though I thought I was well prepared for such an emergecny, I
wasn't.

			David Lawyer