Emergency recovery kernel for CentOS 5 / boot image
 

Hello,

I need to install an recovery kernel on some CentOS 5 (32bit) servers.

I could just create a custom kernel and drop it in /boot, and provide entries in grub.conf, yes?

The other thing I was wondering, is can I take a CD boot image, like Scientific Linux (which has worked very well for us in the past), and put the .iso file under /boot, then have grub point to the iso, and boot from there? How well might that work?

I would like to hear some others' experiences and opinions on this before I decide which way I should go.

Thanks very much!

Adding kernels is trivial - if you do it yourself you can even skip the initrd. So yes to the first question.

grub2 was designed to support booting iso via a loop mount. Like everything else about grub2 it was pretty flaky, so I have yet to test if it actually works yet. Whether you would want to go to that extent (installing grub2) is debatable.