Red Hat Linux Rescue environment experience

Posted by Vivek Gite [Last updated: November 7, 2005]

Well, I just came back to work after 1 week of holiday. My first trouble ticket reads, "unable to boot dedicated Red Hat Linux box". So I had to fixed this box offline. Unfortunately all servers in old rack are without KVM Roam device (it is just as good as being in front of the monitor and keyboard but remotely). So I had to take out this box from rack and take to our lab.

Soon I discovered problem with file system (hang at automount). So I decided to boot into Red hat Linux Rescue environment. To do this at boot prompt I had typed (Grub boot loader):
linux rescue

I have used rescue environment at least 100 times in past. However this time system hangs in rescue environment :/? I said what the f*** problem...

I had spent at least 30-35 minutes to fix problem but no way... finally I had to call our support level 2 UNIX guys (if they can't fix it then you have to depend upon community and Google) and he quickly pointed out me to pass nomount option to rescue environment, so my command at boot was as follows:
linux rescue nomount

This did the trick and I was successfully able to repair disk partition using fsck. I have learned very important lesson a corrupt partition can cause problem... nomount disables automated mounting of file systems.

Between we are making few changes to this blog templates and we are gonna introduce couple of new features, so if you noticed anything broken please contact us. Hopefully will able to finished it before this month end.

And yes all *BSD operating system are updated too FreeBSD version 6.0
OpenBSD version 3.8
NetBSD version 2.1