wrp@biochsn.acc.Virginia.EDU (William R. Pearson) (06/30/90)
I have just recovered from a motherboard failure (allowing me to upgrade from my original 6 MHz IBM-PC/AT with Intel Inboard 386 to an 25 MHz AMI board). Fortunately, my disk was left more or less intact, except for a few files that I was able to restore from tape. I had planned for such a disaster by making an "emergency boot floppy" with mkdev fd as discussed in Chapter 16 (I think) of the System Administration Guide. Unfortunately, when I tried to use this floppy, the machine ended up booting off of the hard disk. I made another emergency floppy, with the same result. Why can't I make an emergency floppy (boot and root) that will simply boot, and then allow me to do restore's and the like onto an unmounted hard disk? Bill Pearson