Re: Rescue mode

[Jesse Pollard <pollard@tomcat.admin.navo.hpc.mil>]

Nimrod Zimerman <zimerman@deskmail.com> wrote:
>On Sun, Mar 07, 1999 at 01:03:06PM -0500, Albert D. Cahalan wrote:
>
>> The rest of his ideas would require a decent boot loader, which we
>> don't have. We won't have a decent boot loader without the ability
>> to write the code in C, and we might need more space at the beginning
>> of an ext2 filesystem.
>
>Assuming I understood the paragarph correctly, you are looking for a
>boot-loader written (mostly) in C. Isn't lilo the same? I wouldn't know.
>I've never seriously used it.
>
>Grub is a good boot-loader, with some valued features that I really like.
>Its greatest advantage is that it understands ext2 and fat filesystems (and
>maybe some more), hence you can start, from your boot-loader, any kernel on
>any accessible filesystem. This is especially useful when things
>go the wrong way.
>
>> Hey, that's another kernel issue: more space at the beginning of an
>> ext2 filesystem. I'd say 96 kB would be good.
>
>If this would be available too, Grub (which is far larger than lilo) would
>make an even better boot-loader. Currently, it still requires a piece of it
>to live in a constant place on some known media (a file on the Linux
>partition would do) - if this constant place can be made even more constant,
>things would be even better.

Actually, a very simple file system could be done (using a partition on
the disk) to allocate sufficient space for a very large loader. Using a
DOS FAT file system of 1-5 MB would not be unreasonable for a boot loader,
recovery system, and/or other diagnostic software. I do not mean to have
a MSDOS OS (unless it were free like OpenDOS).
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jesse I Pollard, II
Email: pollard@navo.hpc.mil

Any opinions expressed are solely my own.
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