Thanks, Collins. This sounds like something I've been wishing for. Collins wrote: > Just a word to the newbies (or the oldies as well) among us, if you > don't already have a copy of the linuxcare bootable cdrom > (www.linuxcare.com), get one soonest. It's the greatest thing since > sliced bread. You can even download and burn it from Windows. If you > ever reach the point where you can't boot a linux system you'll be glad > to have it. You can boot linuxcare on just about any imaginable pc and > use it to do needed maintenance. It even supports your lan (dhcp) and > offers lynx for browsing the web. Probably ftp as well, but I haven't > checked that out. If you have framebuffer support in your kernel, you > can even start X > > Another thing you'll want as a part of your toolkit is a grub boot > floppy (see the SXS for that). Yes I know LILO is preferred by many and > grub is a royal pain, but LILO is pretty much worthless in an emergency > situation, because you can't regenerate it's choices on the fly without > having everything mounted and from a runnable linux partition. > > I've just spent a couple of weeks monitoring mail from Outlook, since I > had to install Win98 after the fact which predictably trashed my mbr. > Now that I found the time to do the repairs, it was quite simple: > > 1) boot from linuxcare. > > 2) mount the grub floppy and update the menu.lst. If you've forgotten > the kernel names, you can mount those partitions to take a peek. Grub > doesn't even care that I have some old boot stanzas from another machine > in the menu.lst. Umount the floppy. > > 3) Boot a runnable linux with grub installed using the floppy (gentoo in > my case) > > 4) Mount the partition that is going to be constant (hda1 - Win98 in my > case), create /boot/grub directories, and copy all the /boot/grub files > to this new directory, mount the grub boot floppy and copy its menu.lst > to the new directory (or update the menu.lst as required) > > 5) grub, root (hd0,0), setup (hd0), quit, umount everything and reboot > > 6) Now you're back in business. gentoo even adds a pretty splash screen > for grub. > > 6) If you take my approach (using the Windows partition for storage of > the /boot/grub files), be aware that you will need to repeat this > process if you ever defrag the Windows disk. Whereas LILO neets to know > the exact hard coded locations of all kernels, the only location > dependancy in grub is the location of the grub files. > > Now I'm back to elx, and I don't have to suffer through Uncle Bill's > Outlook monstrosity to get mail.
-- Michael R. Hipp Microsoft Windows XP: Just say no. _______________________________________________ Linux-users mailing list - http://linux-sxs.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-users Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Archives,and Digests are located at the above URL.
