Red Hat ENTERPRISE LINUX 3 - FOR X86-ITANIUMTM-AMD64 AND INTEL EXTENDED MEMORY 64 TECHNOLO, Installation Manual

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Chapter 4. Installing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 41
4.18.2. Rescue Mode
Rescue mode provides the ability to boot a small Red Hat Enterprise Linux environment entirely from
a diskette, CD-ROM, or some other boot method instead of the system’s hard drive. There may be
times when you are unable to get Red Hat Enterprise Linux running completely enough to access files
on your system’s hard drive. Using rescue mode, you can access the files stored on your system’s hard
drive, even if you cannot actually run Red Hat Enterprise Linux from that hard drive. If you need to
use rescue mode, there are several options available to you.
•
Using the CD-ROM to boot an x86, AMD64, or Intel® EM64T system, type linux rescue at
the installation boot prompt. Itanium users should type
elilo linux rescue
to enter rescue
mode.
•
By booting your system from an installation boot diskette made from the
bootdisk.img
image.
This method requires that the Red Hat Enterprise Linux CD-ROM #1 be inserted as the rescue
image or that the rescue image be on the hard drive as an ISO image. Once you have booted
using this diskette, type
linux rescue
at the
boot:
prompt. Itanium users should type
elilo
linux rescue
to enter rescue mode.
For additional information, refer to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux System Administration Guide .
4.18.3. Alternative Boot Loaders
If you do not wish to use a boot loader, you have several alternatives:
LOADLIN
You can load Linux from MS-DOS. Unfortunately, this requires a copy of the Linux kernel (and
an initial RAM disk, if you have a SCSI adapter) to be available on an MS-DOS partition. The
only way to accomplish this is to boot your Red Hat Enterprise Linux system using some other
method (for example, from a boot diskette) and then copy the kernel to an MS-DOS partition.
LOADLIN is available from
ftp://metalab.unc.edu/pub/Linux/system/boot/dualboot/
and associated mirror sites.
SYSLINUX
SYSLINUX is an MS-DOS program very similar to LOADLIN. It is also available from
ftp://metalab.unc.edu/pub/Linux/system/boot/loaders/
and associated mirror sites.
Commercial boot loaders
You can load Linux using commercial boot loaders. For example, System Commander and Parti-
tion Magic are able to boot Linux (but still require GRUB or LILO to be installed in your Linux
root partition).
Note
Boot loaders such as LOADLIN and System Commander are considered to be third-party boot load-
ers and are not supported by Red Hat.