Lifeboat configuration: ATAPI device under 2.6 kernel
 

I'm attempting to build a Lifeboat rescue CD (after experiencing some nasty downtime).

I'm confused as to how to set the CDR_DEVICE and IDESCCI variables. My (2.6.x) kernel is accessing the cd burner as an ATAPI device, without SCSI emulation. The documentation doesn't seem to indicate that there is a way to access the cd burner other than scsi.

Am I going to need to build the scsi-emulation modules?

(For those who are interested, learn about the Lifeboat tool here)

"I'm confused as to how to set the CDR_DEVICE and IDESCCI variables. My (2.6.x) kernel is accessing the cd burner as an ATAPI device, without SCSI emulation. The documentation doesn't seem to indicate that there is a way to access the cd burner other than scsi."

The LifeBoat documentation is behind the times. The 2.6 kernel changes the way that the CD burner is addressed. You should set CDR_DEVICE=/dev/hdx where /dev/hdx is the address of your CD burner.

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Steve Stites

Thanks! That worked fine, and I built a CD.

However, I don't seem to be able to boot into a shell with it. Seems there is some kind of option issue with mingetty - my console filled up with usage errors from mingetty:

/sbin/mingetty: invalid option -- -
Usage: mingetty ...

and then
INIT id "1" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
for id's 1 to 6.

which is where things halted, with an
INIT: no more processes left in this runlevel.

Seemed there were other issues too - Ctrl + Alt + Del gave
INIT: cannot execute "/etc/lifeboat/rcb"

Have you an ideas on this?
I'd love to get this rescue disk functional before I install lilo over grub and then remove my unneeded hard drives.

"Have you an ideas on this?"

Are you using the Debian distribution version of LifeBoat?
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Steve Stites

Yep. DISTRO=Debian

I found that my /sbin/mingetty is a link to /sbin/getty. This requires at least 2 arguments: port and baud rate. There is only one (the port) argument in LifeBoat-0.4/etc/inittab

I found that my /etc/inittab had entries like this:

1:2345:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty1

So, I added 38400 as an arg in LifeBoat-0.4/etc/inittab, and this time it booted.

I'm guessing an `apt-get install mingetty` might also do the trick? It seems by default Debian creates a link to getty if mingetty is not installed...
I watched the lifeboat build more closely this time - I guess this was the crux of the matter:

/sbin/mingetty already exists..................../sbin/getty not linked


This time, I had different problems, similar to the issue I had when trying to issue the 3-fingered salute (and by the way, that should have read
INIT: cannot execute "/etc/lifeboat/rc6"
sorry..)

Just before presenting the console during the lifeboat boot, I had errors running /etc/lifeboat/boot and /etc/lifeboat/rc3 (nonexistant)
etc/boot and etc/rc3 definitely exist in my unpacked Lifeboat package (as does etc/rc6).

More seriously, I could not login -

PAM Failure aborting: Critical error - immediate abort


Not sure where to head on these..