Re: what replaces "emergency"?

[Robert Siemer]

From: Tom <address@hidden>

> I had to try to repair a friend's machine last night,
> however, and I could not (even searching the net on
> another computer) find the equivalent to LILO's
> "emergency" command (bring the system up in single user
> mode, with only the root partition mounted, and that
> mounted read only).
> 
> It seems like grub should do that. Can someone tell me
> how? Thanks.

I don't know lilo's "emergency" command, but lilo (and grub) is not in
the position to do want you want. Maybe lilo has some shortcuts to
instruct the _kernel_ to do so. This is usually done via kernel
command line arguments (you can see them in /proc/cmdline).

You can do the same with grub. Provide "single" as an argument to boot
in single user mode. And give "ro" to the kernel to mount root
read-only (but that's done often as default).

So, load the kernel this way:

kernel /somewhere/mykernel single ro root=/dev/rootpartition

Note that options to boot in single user mode get interpreted by
/sbin/init, so in reality bypassing the kernel.

See man-page "bootparam" or other sources for information about kernel
parameters...


Bye,
        Robert