WELCOME! Welcome to the Linuxcare Bootable Business Card, version 1.0. You can use this mini-CDROM to boot and access most, if not all, of the resources available on your system even when you can't get your system to boot from its hard disk. We've provided a reasonably large set of applications that you can use to: (a) repair a broken system (b) recover a lost system from backup (c) save important information to a floppy (d) boot any computer as a basic Linux system First, some information from our lawyers: NOTE: THIS CDROM IS FOR USE BY EXPERTS ONLY! YOU CAN REALLY DISABLE YOUR SYSTEM AND CAUSE IRREPARABLE DATA LOSS BY USING THIS CDROM OR ANY OF THE TOOLS ON IT ON YOUR COMPUTER. DON'T USE THIS DISK UNLESS YOU REALLY REALLY KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING! YOU MUST READ AND ACCEPT THE TERMS LISTED IN DISCLAIMER.txt BEFORE USING THIS DISK. DON'T RUN WITH SCISSORS. Ok, now that that's over with, here's some basics on how to use this disk. CONTENTS: - System Requirements - Booting and Logging in - What Else Happens - Shutting Down the System - Making Devices (If Necessary) - Creating Recovery Information for later use - Restoring Recovery Information from your Rescue Floppy - Getting Networking to work - Getting SSH to run - Plug and Play - Getting Support SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS: * An Intel x86 desktop system with bootable CDROM (ATAPI Preferred) - While we've had good results with some laptops, they present a number of special challenges that we've chosen to avoid, like non-standard CDROMs, PCMCIA support, USB floppies, and other weird components. If you can get your Laptop to boot the Linuxcare Promotional Recovery CDROM, great. Just don't expect miracles. * Intel x86 processor architecture * Bootable IDE or PCI SCSI CDROM * 16 MB RAM or more * VGA monitor BOOTING AND LOGGING IN: Just put the disk in your CDROM caddy with the hole in the center. On most modern CDROM drives, there is an indent for mini-CDs (also known as CD singles) and this CDROM should fit perfectly into this groove. Start the computer. Make sure that your computer's BIOS places the CDROM before any other device in the boot order. The system should boot up, go through its startup sequence, and bring you to a "#" prompt. You've arrived! WHAT ELSE HAPPENS: All of the hard disk partitions get mounted, to /mnt/0, /mnt/1, ... /mnt/10, /mnt/11, etc. This CDROM will get mounted on /mnt/cdrom; any other CDROMs will get mounted as if they were hard disk partitions. All of the disk partitions get mounted READ-ONLY. mount -o remount,rw PATH will make that disk partition writable, so that you can make changes to the data on that partition. There are 4 Virtual consoles enabled by default - access them by pressing ALT-F1 through ALT-F4. Log in as user "root", with password "Linuxcare". SHUTTING DOWN THE SYSTEM: When you're ready to shutdown the system, type: sync; reboot We recommend remounting your disks read-only before rebooting. However, the reboot script we've created should take care of most of those details for you. MAKING DEVICES (IF NECESSARY): If you need to make a special device file that was not created by default, use the MAKEDEV command in the /dev directory, like this: cd /dev ; ./MAKEDEV devicename CREATING RECOVERY INFORMATION FOR LATER USE: One piece of information that you want to save is the contents of each disk's partition table. It is usually containted on the first sector of the each disk installed on your system. To save it, put a new floppy in your computer. Type the following: mkext2fs /dev/fd0 mkdir -p /mnt/floppy mount -t ext2 /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy Then for each of your disks, such as /dev/hda, /dev/hdb, /dev/sda, etc., do: dd if=/dev/DISKNAME of=/mnt/floppy/DISKNAME bs=512 count=1 RESTORING RECOVERY INFORMATION FROM YOUR RESCUE FLOPPY: If you've got a disk that became corrupted and you wish to restore it, first restore the partition table of the disk. After booting from this CDROM, put in your rescue floppy and type: mkdir -p /mnt/floppy mount -t ext2 /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy cd / umount /dev/DISKNAME* dd if=/mnt/floppy/DISKNAME of=/dev/DISKNAME USING UTILITIES TO REPAIR OR RECOVER DATA Many disk-related utilities have been included on this CDROM, including fsck and mkfs utilities, several versions of fdisk, and many other powerful utilities. For the ultimate in low-level disk editing, try "lde". (To see what's installed, type "ls /usr/bin"; please locate and read documentation for any piece of software with which you are unfamiliar before attempting to use it to recover data.) GETTING NETWORKING TO WORK: By default, networking is disabled upon boot. If you want to enable networking, a number of kernel modules are included on the CDROM so that you can get on to the net. Go to the /mnt/cdrom/lib/modules/ directory and run: insmod MODULENAME If you have a dhcp server on the network, you can use dhcpcd to configure your network (just type "dhcpcd"); otherwise, you can manually configure your network card with tools like ifconfig and route. For instance: insmod /lib/modules/my-ethernet-card.o ifconfig eth0 inet 192.168.17.23 netmask 255.255.255.0 broadcast 255.255.255.255 route add -net 192.168.0.0 route add -net default gw 192.168.17.1 Now check your DNS servers in /etc/resolv.conf (we've included defaults which will work if you're directly connected to the Internet), and your connection should be usable. Typing "install-ssh" will retrieve the Secure Shell package for you, and is a good way to test whether your network connectivity is working. If you have networking trouble, you can use the included network diagnostic utilities, including several card-level diagnostics, ping, traceroute, DNS query utilities, and more. GETTING SSH TO RUN Due to export restrictions, we can't put ssh onto the system. However, we have included a script that will install ssh and related utilities if you have networking up and a connection to the internet. To install ssh, type: install-ssh and as long as you are properly on the network, all of the ssh tools will become installed on your ramdisk. PLUG-AND-PLAY In order to get any plug-and-play cards running, see the Plug-and-Play-HOWTO on the CDROM. GETTING SUPPORT There is a mailing list set up so that users of this CDROM can support each other. Linuxcare does NOT provide official support for this promotional CDROM, but a number of support engineers are subscribed and do provide input as time allows. To subscribe: Send an email to "lnx-bbc-request@linuxcare.com" with the word "subscribe" (sans quotes) in the body of the message. To unsubscribe: Send an email to "lnx-bbc-request@linuxcare.com" with the word "unsubscribe" (sans quotes) in the body of the message. To send a message to the list: Once you're subscribed, you can send a message to the list by sending the email to: lnx-bbc@linuxcare.com Enjoy! - The Linuxcare Bootable Business Card CDROM Team: The people who made this possible: Duncan MacKinnon Seth David Schoen Tom Crimi _aka_ inf Mike Higashi Jim Dennis Patrice Regan Art Tyde Dave Sifry The Linuxcare Tech Support Team Mr. Pizza Man of San Francisco Special thanks go to the folks who made Tom's Root/Boot, Hal91, and ODL, to all the people who have contributed to the programs included on the disk - and to the worldwide free software community.