large files under the old root need to be deleted
 

This is a recovery exercise using TAR files. I should have deleted a few of these before I started. Now they are keeping me from being able to untar my backup file.

As I understand this, the rescue disk creates a new root. I need help accessing the old root to get to the files I'll need to delete. I assume this is still possible.

I deleted directories completely at random to simulate a failure. I know for a fact that the directory containing the tar files was not directly affected.

Can anyone get me going in the right direction?

Thanks in advance. Mark

"As I understand this, the rescue disk creates a new root."

The rescue system creates a / file system in memory and runs on that.

"I need help accessing the old root to get to the files I'll need to delete. I assume this is still possible."

You access / by mounting your / partition on an empty directory. For example if / is an ext3 file system located on /dev/hda3 then:

mkdir /horses
mount -t ext3 /dev/hda3 /horses

Then you access the crippled system on /horses. For example, lilo.conf is at /horses/etc/lilo.conf.

-------------------------------
Steve Stites

the "fix"
 

Steve: Thanks a lot for you help. I may see this again so I have filed your response.

What we actually did to fix this practice problem was this:

1) changed directory to proc and listed (cat) off partitions (a file you should see)
2) inside there is about 1/2 dozen or so partitions with their pathes.
3) we decided to change directory to the largest one in the list
4) this happened to be the old root
5) I then changed directories to the tar file location and deleted a few older files (freeing needed space)
6) once this was done, I was then able to decompress my TAR file backup
7) I did a TAR recovery from the root
8) I had to substitute /mnt/sysimage for / in the command line syntax
9) exited the shell which will reboot the machine

Mark