DISK CRASH -- floppy boot

[Tanya Katz]

In article <8904181249.AA22934 at zorch.UU.NET> scott at zorch.UU.NET (Scott Hazen Mueller) writes: (for David Melman)

>The question:
>
>How can the system allow the removal of the boot floppy (and stay up)
>so the readable files off the hard disk can be backed up to the floppy
>drive?
>

In <513 at uncle.UUCP> (John B. Milton) replied:

>Well, looks like you've got quite a problem. My suggestion would be to get the
>hard disk patched up to the point that you can get it mounted again. When you
>say that it won't boot, that seems strange. Try running fsck -y /dev/fp002,

I've often wondered the same thing myself...  You have to do regular backups!!

I noticed early on that a power outage caused me to enter into the 
check-boot-check loop, and I had to go the floppy boot route.  
The first time I managed to blow away my rc file and had to reload all.  
But when it happened again, I was a bit more rational and managed to 
comment out the fsck in the rc file and boot up without the fsck.  

I made a floppy filesystem that has fsck on it, and it is not write 
protected, so I could use vi.  I keep several of these spare file systems 
handy (one has fsdb) for real heavy duty emergencies.  

After booting with the floppy and exiting to the shell, I type in 
mount <Return> 
and see what is mounted & where the mount point is.  Then 
umount /dev/fp002 and use fsck.  I don't use the -y option though.  
This prevents the removal of files that have data in them.  I do make 
note of the inode & search for the file names using ncheck or find -inum.

Most of the time the problem has been very minor and easily repairable
by fsck.  You can even rescue your files from lost+found, if you can
identify them.

I suppose I should invest in a ups, but until I do, this is my recovery
method.

	Tanya

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