toasted root file system

[John Woods]

In article <4469 at buengc.BU.EDU>, bph at buengc.BU.EDU (Blair P. Houghton) writes:
> In article <1244 at virtech.UUCP> cpcahil at virtech.UUCP (Conor P. Cahill) writes:
> >In article <MRD.89Oct6222225 at sun.clarkson.edu>, mrd at sun.soe.clarkson.edu (Michael DeCorte) writes:
> >> So what do you do if you mangle root?  
> >You have to have some alternative method of booting the system, otherwise
> >how did you get the os on there in the first place.
> Monitor-mode, which comes from a prom?
> 				--Blair
> 				  "Front-panel switches?"

Ah, front-panel switches.  Back when I ran a PDP-11, our panic-restore method
was quite simple:  a short assembly language program named "omg" (for Oh My
God), punched on several paper tapes and short enough to toggle in by hand
if need be, which would copy a tape image onto the root partition.  Every
couple of weeks, we'd create a root backup tape with a script named "gmo"
(for obvious reasons).

On these new-fangled systems without switches, and WORSE YET with complicated
controllers requiring gigabytes of code to engage in long philosophical
arguments with them just to get data shuffled back and forth, such a brute-force
solution might not be so elegant.  But it worked.
-- 
John Woods, Charles River Data Systems, Framingham MA 508-626-1101
...!decvax!frog!john, john at frog.UUCP, ...!mit-eddie!jfw, jfw at eddie.mit.edu