Hello,

In an excercise today, I decided to show my team what happens if you nuke the /etc dir with rm -rf /etc/* (do not try this at home).

So yes, the system whent DOWN,DOWN,DOWN and I said:

Its ok guys, I will know show you how to use LINUX RESCUE.

GUESS WHAT? It said that there was NO sign of a LINUX partition, and gave me a shell with no sign of /mnt/sysimage.

Is there a way out of this?

Is it failing to recognise my /mnt/sysimage because it can't find /etc ????

Please help, or I'll have to take the guys through another session of ANACONDA.

<humor>
Who would have guessed? Seeing as how Linux finds what partitions to mount in a file named "/etc/fstab"

Unfortunately, the final words many people utter on their dieing breath just happen to be "Hey yall, watch this!!!"

This reminds me of one of the "Darwin Award" candidates a few years back. Some corporate lawyer/executive type who wanted to demonstrate how strong their window glass used in skyscrapers was. Went to the far side of the room, got up a full running head of steam, and launched himself into the glass. You can guess what happened next.

</humor>

I'm not yanking your chain - well, ok, maybe just a little! We've all done things that appear in retrospect, ahem, not quite so well thought out. Unfortunately, /etc pretty much holds all files that define your system identity. i.e., what makes your Linux installation any different than somebody elses. So it's pretty hard to recover your unique identity from some generic rescue disk. A recently made backup would be the most useful path to recovery.

Rescue mode automatically mounts the / partition at /mnt/sysimage. You should be able to manually mount any partition. If you do not know what partition is your / then you will have to look at the output of fdisk or cfdisk and guess. i.e.
fdisk -l