Booting Rescue Mode

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.

  Tip

  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.

• 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 Chapter 2.

After booting off of 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, Linux will attempt to mount your file system 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 file system in read-only mode. If you select Skip, your file system will not be mounted. Choose Skip if you think your file system is corrupted.