Installation guide

60 Chapter 3. Rescue Mode

In these situations, you may be unable to boot Red Hat Linux. If you can get into rescue

mode, you might be able to resolve the problem or at least get copies of your most important

ﬁles.

3.2. 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.

• 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 the Ofﬁcial Red Hat Linux Installation Guide.

After booting off 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, it will attempt to mount your ﬁlesystem 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 ﬁlesystem under the directory /mnt/sysimage, but in read-only

mode. If you select Skip, your ﬁlesystem will not be mounted. Choose Skip if you think

your ﬁlesystem is corrupted.

Once you have your system in rescue mode, a prompt appears on VC (virtual console) 1 and

VC 2 (use the [Ctrl]-[Alt]-[F1] key combination to access VC 1 and [Ctrl]-[Alt]-[F2] to access

VC 2):

sh-2.05a#

If you selected Continue to mount your partitions automatically and they were mounted

successfully, you are in single-user mode.

To mount a Linux partition manually inside rescue mode, create a directory such as /foo,

and type the following command:

1. 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.