RESCUE(8)						    BSD System Manager's Manual 						 RESCUE(8)

NAME

     rescue -- rescue utilities in /rescue

DESCRIPTION

     The /rescue directory contains a collection of common utilities intended for use in recovering a badly damaged system.  With the transition
     to a dynamically-linked root beginning with NetBSD 2.0, there is a real possibility that the standard tools in /bin and /sbin may become non-
     functional due to a failed upgrade or a disk error.  The tools in /rescue are statically linked and should therefore be more resistant to
     damage.  However, being statically linked, the tools in /rescue are also less functional than the standard utilities.  In particular, they do
     not have full use of the locale, pam(3), and nsswitch libraries.

     If your system fails to boot, and it shows an error message similar to:

	   init: not found

     try booting the system with the boot flag ``-a'' and supplying /rescue/init, which is the rescue init(8), as the init path.

     If your system fails to boot, and it shows a prompt similar to:

	   Enter full pathname of shell or RETURN for /bin/sh:

     the first thing to try running is the standard shell, /bin/sh.  If that fails, try running /rescue/sh, which is the rescue shell.	To repair
     the system, the root partition must first be remounted read-write.  This can be done with the following mount(8) command:

	   /rescue/mount -uw /

     The next step is to double-check the contents of /bin, /lib, /libexec, and /sbin, possibly mounting a NetBSD installation CD-ROM and copying
     files from there.	Once it is possible to successfully run /bin/sh, /bin/ls, and other standard utilities, try rebooting back into the stan-
     dard system.

     The /rescue tools are compiled using crunchgen(1), which makes them considerably more compact than the standard utilities.

FILES

     /rescue  Root of the rescue hierarchy.

SEE ALSO

     crunchgen(1)

HISTORY

     The rescue utilities first appeared in NetBSD 2.0.

AUTHORS

     The rescue system was written by Luke Mewburn <lukem@NetBSD.org>.	This manual page was written by Simon L. Nielsen <simon@FreeBSD.org>,
     based on text by Tim Kientzle <kientzle@FreeBSD.org>.

BUGS

     Most of the rescue tools work even in a fairly crippled system.  The most egregious exception is the rescue version of vi(1), which currently
     requires that /usr be mounted so that it can access the termcap(5) files.	Hopefully, a failsafe termcap(3) entry will eventually be added
     into the curses(3) library, so that /rescue/vi can be used even in a system where /usr cannot immediately be mounted.  In the meantime, the
     rescue version of the ed(1) editor can be used from /rescue/ed if you need to edit files, but cannot mount /usr.

BSD
								 January 20, 2009							       BSD