rescue(8) - NetBSD Manual Pages

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RESCUE(8)               NetBSD System Manager's Manual               RESCUE(8)


NAME

     rescue -- rescue utilities in /rescue


DESCRIPTION

     The /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 NetBSD 2.0, there is a real possi-
     bility that the standard tools in /bin and /sbin may become non-func-
     tional due to a failed upgrade or a disk error.  The tools in /rescue are
     statically linked and should therefore be more resistant to damage.  How-
     ever, being statically linked, the tools in /rescue are also less func-
     tional 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 stan-
     dard system.

     The /rescue tools are compiled using crunchgen(1), which makes them con-
     siderably more compact than the standard utilities.


FILES

     /rescue  Root of the rescue hierarchy.


SEE ALSO

     crunchgen(1)


HISTORY

     The rescue utilities first appeared in NetBSD 2.0.


AUTHORS

     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>.

NetBSD 8.2                       April 5, 2012                      NetBSD 8.2