Question about hard disk boot

[Dave Olson]

In <9103261423.AA02413 at slic.cellbio.duke.edu> jit at SLIC.CELLBIO.DUKE.EDU (Jit Keong Tan) writes:
| HI, I have a question about booting up from the hard disk and tapedrive.
| 
| If the hard disk refuses to boot up, is it possible to boot
| up from somewhere else such as the tapedrive ?  Then proceed to
| mount the hard disk and salvage the hard drive without booting it.

Sure, simply start a normal software installation with your eoe1 boot
tape.  The first thing it does is copy the miniroot over to your swap
partition.  After that, use the sh(ell) escape and go to it.

If the disk partitions are trashed, then you need to use fx to fix it up.
fx.CPUTYPE is also on the same tape.  See your owners manual for
info on how to boot it up.

| I read the man page on mkboottape(1M) and don't quite understand
| this line:
| >     Unless you have means to create a stand alone program this utility is
| >     useless.

mkboottape only puts files onto the tape in a form the boot proms can
understand.  The comment refers to the fact that SGI provides no way
to create your own standalone programs.  Using it to create a bootable
tape from the files in /stand, etc. will work fine.  In one sense, the kernel
itself is a standalone program, and you can in fact boot it directly from
tape or from the disk volume header (provided your volume header is
big enough).
--

	Dave Olson

Life would be so much easier if we could just look at the source code.