Booting Rescue Mode

To boot your system in rescue mode, boot from a Red Hat Linux boot disk or the Red Hat Linux CD-ROM #1, and enter the following command at the installation boot prompt:

boot: linux rescue

You can get to the installation boot prompt in one of these ways:

After booting off a boot disk or Red Hat Linux CD-ROM #1 and providing a valid rescue image, you will see the following message:

The rescue environment will now attempt to find your Red Hat
Linux installation and mount it under the directory
/mnt/sysimage.  You can then make any changes required to your
system.  If you want to proceed with this step choose
'Continue'. You can also choose to mount your filesystem 
read-only instead of read-write by choosing 'Read-only'.
If for some reason this process fails you can choose 'Skip' 
and this step will be skipped and you will go directly to a
command shell.

If you select Continue, it will attempt to mount your filesystem under the directory /mnt/sysimage. If it fails to mount a partition, it will notify you. If you select Read-Only, it will attempt to mount your filesystem under the directory /mnt/sysimage, but in read-only mode. If you select Skip, your filesystem will not be mounted. Choose Skip if you think your filesystem is corrupted.

Once you have your system in rescue mode, a prompt appears on VC (virtual console) 1 and VC 2 (use the [Ctrl]-[Alt]-[F1] key combination to access VC 1 and [Ctrl]-[Alt]-[F2] to access VC 2):

sh-2.05a#

If you selected Continue to mount your partitions automatically and they were mounted successfully, you are in single-user mode.

To mount a Linux partition manually inside rescue mode, create a directory such as /foo, and type the following command:

mount -t ext3 /dev/hda5 /foo

In the above command, /foo is a directory that you have created and /dev/hda5 is the partition you want to mount. If the partition is of type ext2, replace ext3 with ext2.

If you do not know the names of your partitions, use the following command to list them:

fdisk -l

If your filesystem is mounted and you want to make your system the root partition, use the command chroot /mnt/sysimage. This is useful if you need to run commands such as rpm that require your root partition to be mounted as /. To exit the chroot environment, type exit, and you will return to the prompt.

From the bash# prompt, you can run many useful commands including:

anaconda          gzip        mkfs.ext2   ps
badblocks         head        mknod       python
bash              hwclock     mkraid      python1.5
cat               ifconfig    mkswap      raidstart
chattr            init        mlabel      raidstop
chmod             insmod      mmd         rcp
chroot            less        mmount      rlogin
clock             ln          mmove       rm
collage           loader      modprobe    rmmod
cp                ls          mount       route
cpio              lsattr      mpartition  rpm
dd                lsmod       mrd         rsh
ddcprobe          mattrib     mread       sed
depmode           mbadblocks  mren        sh
df                mcd         mshowfat    sync 
e2fsck            mcopy       mt          tac
fdisk             mdel        mtools      tail
fsck              mdeltree    mtype       tar
fsck.ext2         mdir        mv          touch
fsck.ext3         mdu         mzip        traceroute
ftp               mformat     open        umount
gnome-pty-helper  minfo       pico        uncpio
grep              mkdir       ping        uniq
gunzip            mke2fs      probe       zcat

Notes

[1]

To create an installation boot diskette, insert a blank floppy disk and use the images/boot.img file on the Red Hat Linux CD-ROM #1 with the command dd if=boot.img of=/dev/fd0.