[lug] booting and kernel compiling (was dumpdates)

[John Starkey]

Wayde. I read this yesterday right before everything totally went hay
wire. I deleted a partition and forgot to delete it's fstab entry. And
thought my problem was that the originally Solaris disk was set to 8192
cylinders. Around the circles many times. But I also learned a lot about
disk geometry.  Funny how dumb mistakes make you smarter:}

I didn't even know the sites below existed. I'll check them out.

Thanks.

> You've kind of got this backward.  

Boy that ain't  surprising <grin>

> The kernel is really just a
> standardized interface to the system hardware.  

Ok, to be philosophical. What you're saying is that the kernel really
doesn't have anything to do with keeping the insides going, actively. I
guess that makes sense. Cron though, it get's executed something
what would that be? I assume it's fed from the internal clock (not the
bios right, bios is only the initial boot mechanism)?

> It doesn't have a reason
> or desire to call the mv command.  That is where you come into the
> picture.  You were the one who tried to invoke that command.  The path is
> part of the shell environment that you interact with.

The mv command doesn't even use the kernel then. Pass any arguments??
 
> OK, but my point is that a boot floppy simply kick starts the system,
> mounts the root file system from your hard drive, and at that point is
> basically done.  If the root file system has been modified from its
> original form the boot floppy won't know what to do with it.  In other
> words, it relies on the /bin directory for essentially all of its
> programs.  A rescue floppy, install disk, or installation CD, on the other
> hand doesn't (can't actually) make this assumption. 

Now I get it. Thanks.
 
> Most of us have already made the mistakes.  The trick is for you to figure
> out how best to make use of what we've learned.

And I really appreciate all the help from you and everyone. I'd be scared
to find out how much I would have screwed up had it not been for this
group. Whoa.

John