RESCUE(8)               NetBSD System Manager's Manual               RESCUE(8)

NAME
     rescue -- rescue utilities in /rescue

DESCRIPTION
     The /rescue directory contains a collection of common utilities intended
     for use in recovering a badly damaged system.  With the transition to a
     dynamically-linked root beginning with NetBSD 2.0, there is a real possi-
     bility that the standard tools in /bin and /sbin may become non-func-
     tional due to a failed upgrade or a disk error.  The tools in /rescue are
     statically linked and should therefore be more resistant to damage.  How-
     ever, being statically linked, the tools in /rescue are also less func-
     tional than the standard utilities.  In particular, they do not have full
     use of the locale, pam(3), and nsswitch libraries.

     If your system fails to boot, and it shows an error message similar to:

           init: not found

     try booting the system with the boot flag ``-a'' and supplying
     /rescue/init, which is the rescue init(8), as the init path.

     If your system fails to boot, and it shows a prompt similar to:

           Enter full pathname of shell or RETURN for /bin/sh:

     the first thing to try running is the standard shell, /bin/sh.  If that
     fails, try running /rescue/sh, which is the rescue shell.  To repair the
     system, the root partition must first be remounted read-write.  This can
     be done with the following mount(8) command:

           /rescue/mount -uw /

     The next step is to double-check the contents of /bin, /lib, /libexec,
     and /sbin, possibly mounting a NetBSD installation CD-ROM and copying
     files from there.  Once it is possible to successfully run /bin/sh,
     /bin/ls, and other standard utilities, try rebooting back into the stan-
     dard system.

     The /rescue tools are compiled using crunchgen(1), which makes them con-
     siderably more compact than the standard utilities.

FILES
     /rescue  Root of the rescue hierarchy.

SEE ALSO
     crunchgen(1), crash(8)

HISTORY
     The rescue utilities first appeared in NetBSD 2.0.

AUTHORS
     The rescue system was written by Luke Mewburn <lukem@NetBSD.org>.  This
     manual page was written by Simon L. Nielsen <simon@FreeBSD.org>, based on
     text by Tim Kientzle <kientzle@FreeBSD.org>.

BUGS
     Most of the rescue tools work even in a fairly crippled system.  The most
     egregious exception is the rescue version of vi(1), which currently
     requires that /usr be mounted so that it can access the termcap(5) files.
     Hopefully, a failsafe termcap(3) entry will eventually be added into the
     curses(3) library, so that /rescue/vi can be used even in a system where
     /usr cannot immediately be mounted.  In the meantime, the rescue version
     of the ed(1) editor can be used from /rescue/ed if you need to edit
     files, but cannot mount /usr.

NetBSD 5.0_STABLE              October 20, 2008              NetBSD 5.0_STABLE
