SLES Boot and Rescue Disks

In the unfortunate event that your SLES 9 system disk is corrupted and no longer bootable, you can still (likely) access the data on the filesystems if you boot with a rescue disk. If you have the SLES CDs or DVD available, you simply boot using the DVD or CD1. At the boot screen, select Rescue System and press Enter. From the language selection dialog box, highlight the desired language and press Enter. When the rescue system starts, log in as root.

NOTE

You can find detailed information about emergency boot and recovery in Chapter 3.

What can you do if your CD-ROM drive doesn't support bootable CDs or you don't have the media handy? If you have the foresight, you can use YaST to create a set of boot or rescue floppy diskettes for just such an emergency.

These floppy disks are helpful if the boot configuration of your system is damaged. The rescue disk is especially necessary if the filesystem of the root partition is damaged. In this case, you might also need the module disk with various drivers to be able to access the system (for example, to access a RAID system).

To access the Create Boot or Rescue Floppies module, from the YaST Control Center, select System, Create a Boot, Rescue or Module Floppy. (From a terminal session, you can use yast2 bootfloppy or yast bootfloppy.) A dialog box similar to Figure 10.4 is displayed.

Figure 10.4. Creating boot and rescue floppies.

Using this YaST module, you can create the following types of floppy disks:

• Standard Boot Floppy 1, 2, or 3 Use these options to create standard boot disks so that you can boot an installed system. You also need these disks to start the rescue system.

• Rescue Floppy This disk contains a special environment that allows you to perform maintenance tasks in your installed system, such as checking and repairing the file system and updating the boot loader.

• Module Floppies Module disks contain additional system drivers that may be required to support hardware access. The standard kernel supports only IDE drives. If your system has SCSI controllers, for instance, you need to load the needed drivers from a module disk to be able to access them. If you select this option and click Next, you are taken to a dialog box for creating various module disks.

• Custom Floppy Use this option to write any existing floppy disk image from the hard disk to a floppy disk.

• Download Floppy Image Use this option to specify a URL and authentication data to download a floppy disk image from the Internet.

To create one of these floppy disks, select the corresponding option on the screen and then click Next. Insert a blank floppy disk when prompted. Click Next again to create the floppy disk. After you have created the necessary disks, label them and store them in a secure location.