/rescue
/rescue
directory contains a collection of common utilities intended for use
in recovering a badly damaged system.
With the transition to a dynamically-linked root beginning with
NetBSD2.0,
there is a real possibility that the standard tools in
/bin
and
/sbin
may become non-functional due to a failed upgrade or a disk error.
The tools in
/rescue
are statically linked and should therefore be more resistant to
damage.
However, being statically linked, the tools in
/rescue
are also less functional than the standard utilities.
In particular, they do not have full use of the locale,
pam(3),
and nsswitch libraries.
If your system fails to boot, and it shows an error message similar to:
init: not found
try booting the system with the boot flag
``-a''
and supplying
/rescue/init
,
which is the
rescue
init(8),
as the init path.
If your system fails to boot, and it shows a prompt similar to:
Enter full pathname of shell or RETURN for /bin/sh:
the first thing to try running is the standard shell,
/bin/sh
.
If that fails, try running
/rescue/sh
,
which is the
rescue
shell.
To repair the system, the root partition must first be remounted
read-write.
This can be done with the following
mount(8)
command:
/rescue/mount -uw /
The next step is to double-check the contents of
/bin
,
/lib
,
/libexec
,
and
/sbin
,
possibly mounting a
NetBSD
installation CD-ROM
and copying files from there.
Once it is possible to successfully run
/bin/sh
, /bin/ls
,
and other standard utilities, try rebooting back into the standard
system.
The
/rescue
tools are compiled using
crunchgen(1),
which makes them considerably more compact than the standard
utilities.
/rescue
The rescue system was written by Luke Mewburn <lukem@NetBSD.org>. This manual page was written by Simon L. Nielsen <simon@FreeBSD.org>, based on text by Tim Kientzle <kientzle@FreeBSD.org>.
/usr
be mounted so that it can access the
termcap(5)
files.
Hopefully, a failsafe
termcap(3)
entry will eventually be added into the
curses(3)
library, so that
/rescue/vi
can be used even in a system where
/usr
cannot immediately be mounted.
In the meantime, the
rescue
version of the
ed(1)
editor can be used from
/rescue/ed
if you need to edit files, but cannot mount
/usr
.