SUSE LINUX 9.3

Chapter 5. System Repair / 5.4. The SUSE Rescue System
	5.3. Expert Tools		Part II. System

5.4. The SUSE Rescue System

SUSE LINUX contains a rescue system for accessing your Linux partitions from the outside in the event of an emergency. The rescue system can be loaded from CD, the network, or the SUSE FTP server. The rescue system includes several help programs with which you can remedy large problems with inaccessible hard disks, misconfigured configuration files, or other similar problems.

Another component of the rescue system is Parted, which is used for resizing partitions. This program can be launched from within the rescue system, if you do not want to use the resizer integrated in YaST. Information about Parted can be found at http://www.gnu.org/software/parted/.

5.4.1. Starting the Rescue System

Boot your system as you would for installation. Select ‘Rescue System’ from the boot menu. The rescue system is then decompressed, loaded onto a RAM disk as a new root file system, mounted, and started.

5.4.2. Working with the Rescue System

Under Alt-F1 to Alt-F3, the rescue system provides three virtual consoles. You can log in as root without a password. Press Alt-F10 to enter the system console displaying the kernel and syslog messages.

A shell and many other useful utilities, such as the mount program, can be found in the /bin directory. The sbin directory contains important file and network utilities for reviewing and repairing the file system, including reiserfsck and e2fsck. This directory also contains the most important binaries for system maintenance, such as fdisk, mkfs, mkswap, mount, mount, init, and shutdown, and ifconfig, route, and netstat for maintaining the network. The directory /usr/bin contains the vi editor, grep, find, less, and telnet.

5.4.2.1. Accessing Your Normal System

To mount your SUSE LINUX system using the rescue system, use the mount point /mnt. You can also use or create another directory. The following example demonstrates the procedure for a system with the /etc/fstab details shown in Example 5.1, “Example /etc/fstab”.

Example 5.1. Example /etc/fstab

/dev/sdb5    swap   swap    defaults   0   0
/dev/sdb3    /      ext2    defaults   1   1
/dev/sdb6    /usr   ext2    defaults   1   2

	Warning
Pay attention to the order of steps outlined in the following section for mounting the various devices.

To access your entire system, mount it step by step in the /mnt directory using the following commands:

mount /dev/sdb3 /mnt
mount /dev/sdb6 /mnt/usr

Now, access your entire system and, for example, correct mistakes in configuration files, such as /etc/fstab, /etc/passwd, and /etc/inittab. The configuration files are now located in the /mnt/etc directory instead of in /etc. Before recovering lost partitions with the fdisk program by simply setting them up again, make a printout of /etc/fstab and the output of fdisk -l.

5.4.2.2. Repairing File Systems

Damaged file systems are tricky problems for the rescue system. Generally, file systems cannot be repaired on a running system. If you encounter serious problems, you may not even be able to mount your root file system and the system boot may end with kernel panic. In this case, the only way is to repair the system from the outside using a rescue system.

The SUSE LINUX rescue system contains the utilities reiserfsck, e2fsck, and dumpe2fs (for diagnosis). These should remedy most problems. In an emergency, man pages often are not available. For this reason, they are included in this manual in Section B.1, “Manual Page of reiserfsck” and Section B.2, “Manual Page of e2fsck”.

If mounting an ext2 file system fails due to an invalid superblock, the e2fsck program would probably fail, too. If this were the case, your superblock may be corrupted, too. There are copies of the superblock located every 8192 blocks (8193, 16385, etc.). If your superblock is corrupted, try one of the copies instead. This is accomplished by entering the command e2fsck -f -b 8193 /dev/damaged_partition. The -f option forces the file system check and overrides e2fsck's error so that, because the superblock copy is intact, everything is fine.