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## 4.11.1 Recovering using a maintenance diskette

One indispensable tool for the system administrator is the so called ``boot/root disk''---a floppy which can be booted for a complete Linux system, independent of your hard drive. Boot/root disks are actually very simple---you create a root filesystem on the floppy, place all of the necessary utilities on it, and install LILO and a bootable kernel on the floppy. Another technique is to use one floppy for the kernel and another for the root filesystem. In any case, the result is the same: you are running a Linux system completely from floppy.

The canonical example of a boot/root disk is the Slackware boot disks. These diskettes contain a bootable kernel and a root filesystem, all on floppy. They are intended to be used to install the Slackware distribution, but come in very handy when doing system maintenance.

The H.J Lu boot/root disk, available from `/pub/Linux/GCC/rootdisk` on `sunsite.unc.edu`, is another example of such a maintenance disk. Or, if you're ambitious, you can create your own. In most cases, however, using a pre-made boot/root disk is much easier and will probably be more complete.

Using a boot/root disk is very simple. Just boot the disk on your system, and login as `root` (usually no password). In order to access the files on your hard drive, you will need to mount your filesystems by hand. For example, the command

`# mount -t ext2 /dev/hda2 /mnt`

will mount an ext2fs filesystem on `/dev/hda2` under `/mnt`. Remember that `/` is now on the boot/root disk itself; you need to mount your hard drive filesystems under some directory in order to access the files. Therefore, `/etc/passwd` on your hard drive is now `/mnt/etc/passwd` if you mount your root filesystem on `/mnt`.

Next: 4.11.2 Fixing the root Up: 4.11 What To Do Previous: 4.11 What To Do