[SGVLUG] Is there a rescue floppy that works?

[Claude Felizardo]

On 11/2/06, David Lawyer <dave at lafn.org> wrote:
> 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

Yeah, i've run into that a few times but that was a while ago.   Prior
to using chroot, I would modify my lilo.conf and specify alternate
locations of the boot device, etc.  Or you can use the -C option to
specify a different config file.  You can also use the -b option to
specify the boot device.  See man lilo and man lilo.conf for details.
Looks like there's a command line option for most lilo.conf entries.

Otherwise, I would have tried installing the drive in another computer
and fixing it like you did.

Last I used tomsrtbt was when I hacked my first TiVo about four years
ago by replacing the original 30GB drive with a 80 GB drive and
installing a bunch of 3rd party programs.  This is the unit I used
when I gave my Hacking TiVo presentation at SGVLUG a couple of years
ago.  Worked fine until last week when my mother-in-law called to say
her TiVo was stuttering.  I used the backdoor trick to look at the
logs and saw lots of drive errors.  Swapped the Maxtor drive out and
replaced it with the original Quantum and it's working fine again
though with reduced storage capacity.  Still debating if I'll try and
recover her shows or just leave it as is as she tends to watch stuff
sooner and doesn't let the recordings pile up like I do.

claude