Boot primitives (Was: Disk Partitions under Sys V/386)

[Bill Kennedy]

In article <181 at eslvcr.UUCP> ted at eslvcr.wimsey.bc.ca (Ted Powell) writes:
>In article <604 at gistdev.UUCP> joe at gistdev.UUCP (Joe Brownlee) writes:

[ ... Lots of stuff about the disk partitions, mounting, etc. ... ]

>are.  BTW, the boot floppy doesn't have "ls", but echo * works.
>
>Happy hacking!
>-- 
>ted at eslvcr.wimsey.bc.ca   ...!ubc-cs!van-bc!eslvcr!ted    (Ted Powell)

Ted's quite right, and the following will let you cat a file if cat isn't
around:

while read line; do echo $line; done < filename

Life's no fun without ls or cat, but it is not fatal.  You can also mount
the boot floppy (speaking for V/386) when your hard disk is running with
mount /dev/dsk/f0q15d    (this has a one track offset for the boot program)
and put ls, cat, and fsdb on it if they will all fit.  Run an /etc/dfspace
after the mount to see how little room is left and what you can still fit
on it.  A "disaster recovery" diskette is a handy thing to have.

My system went down hard last week and the fsck swallowed /bin/sh, needless
to say things weren't very pretty from there on.  I was able to boot from a
floppy, mount the hard disk on the floppy's /mnt and copy sh from the floppy
to the hard disk.  Since there's so little room left on the stock boot floppy
it's probably a good idea to have a couple of spares with fsdb, cat, and ls
as appropriate and what will fit.
-- 
Bill Kennedy    {texbell,att,cs.utexas.edu,sun!daver}!ssbn!bill
                bill at ssbn.WLK.COM  or attmail!ssbn!bill