Re: [9fans] Re: Reinstalled system won't boot (2)

["Boyd 'rounin' Roberts" <boyd@insultant.net>]

> That sounds outrageous enough to be true...  Would you share the story?

well, i had just coded autoreboot into 32V and my office mate [John Mackin]
booted the new kernel with the old init.  that crashed and burned.  so we
resorted to the stand alone stuff in /stand.  trouble was that stand alone
fsdb was broken in such a way that you couldn't just nominate an inode
to look at.  we were going to binary chop till we found /etc -- no chance.

so we found a screwdriver [jmk: the tool, not the drink, but i sure could
have slammed down a few at that point] and tape to tape it down on the
LA-120's return key and waited ...  it took a long time [hours].  we'd
found that return would scroll you on to the next inode.  iirc the tape
became unstuck serveral times and we had to restart.

once we had found /etc's inode we found the inode numbers for the
inits.  we then stand alone dd'd the first block of /etc onto a 9 track,
mounted on a TU-16.

having another 11/780 with a 9 track we dd'd off the block, poked
around with adb -w and patched /etc/init's inode # to be the new init.
dd'd that block back onto the tape and dd'd it off onto the broken
vax.

booted it up and everything was fine.

john had assumed that the old init would work with the new kernel.
i was going to swap inits & kernels and boot sometime during the
early morning, but he beat me to it.

we had plans with removable RM-03 packs and other plans
that were just not going to work.  it was sporty.  some 128 of the
2000 students were not going to be happy, not to mention the
lecturing staff.

john mackin: http://www.std.org/~shand/jjm
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MGRS 31U DQ 52572 12604