alexpgp | Ugh!

Today has been a solidly foul day, based largely on the fact that the Linux box is still down, and an hour spent this morning trying to revive it accomplished squat. What few annoyances I encountered at the store tended to exacerbate themselves, including The Packaging Job from Hades.

I got some advice via IRC (download a 4-disk core debian distro that would put my machine on the network), but it fell short. For some reason, the floppy disk drive doesn't appear to work; the system won't examine an inserted disk while attempting to boot (when it should), nor will it mount the drive in 'linux rescue' mode.

OTOH, I took one of the cannibalized drives from the IBM and "installed" it on 'onegin' (it's sitting on top of the unit), and find that the drive is recognized and appears to have an ext2 file system on it.

When I get home, I plan to do a 'linux rescue' startup, mount the appropriate partitions on the two drives, and then back up my critical files from 'onegin' onto the cannibalized drive.

Then I'm going to reinstall RedHat 7.1, taking care not to format the /home partition.

Cheers...