SUMMARY: Why does 4.1.1 sun4 miniroot come up with / ro?

From: Gerald Justice (justice@dao.nrc.ca)
Date: Sat Sep 21 1991 - 16:19:22 CDT


This is an RTFM question, of course one shouldn't try such things when one is
tiring and worse yet one shouldn't submit questions to sun-managers in
the same state. Immediately after sending the message and shutting down
my Mac, I was rinsing the diapers before going to bed and realized how
silly I was since even not knowing about the -w option to boot and forgetting
about the alternate way to use mount -o remount for a filesystem not
in /etc/fstab, all I had to do was either copy sd0b to any other partition
and create an /etc/fstab entry then boot from the alternate partition.

WARNING: I haven't tried the above yet, I will do so later today when
I am back at work, but the real answer to my question is
        boot sd(0,0,1) -sw
which I didn't know about because I boot single user all the time and
/ always comes up rw (because of /etc/fstab being there) so I focussed
inappropriately on this instead of thinking it through. (I just checked
and there is no -w option in the 4.1 man page for boot(8) so I don't
feel so bad, although it is in the install manual.)

All this begs the question "if it is so simple to boot a system from the
miniroot, why does the install manual show all these elaborate procedures
for booting the system as a client off another 4.1.1 system?" I'm glad
I tried to shortcut the procedure because I learned something and saved
myself a little time (and next time LOTS of time).

Thanks to:

        cfoley@arsenic.cray.com (Charles Foley)
        mp@allegra.att.com (Mark Plotnick)
        kevinmac@ll.mit.edu (Kevin McElearney)
        per@erix.ericsson.se (Per Hedeland)

and the dozens more I will probably get yet.

Gerald Justice
Unix Systems Manager (in training!)
Phone: (604) 363-0055 PDT Fax: (604) 363-0045 Telex: 049-7295
Internet: justice@dao.nrc.ca Mail: Dominion Astrophysical Observatory
                                            National Research Council (Canada)
BITNET: justice@nrcdao 5071 W. Saanich Road
VAX PSI: 68100434::justice Victoria, B.C. CANADA V8X 4M6



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