5. Booting tomsrtbt

The first thing to do before starting the restoration process is to verify that the hardware time is set correctly. Use the BIOS setup for this. How close to exact you have to set the time depends on your applications. For restoration, within a few minutes of exact time should be accurate enough. This will allow time-critical events to pick up where they left off when you finally launch the restored system.

Before booting tomsrtbt, make sure your ZIP® drive is placed on a parallel port, either /dev/lp0 or /dev/lp1. The start-up software will load the parallel port ZIP® drive driver for you.

The next step is to set the video mode. I usually like to see as much on the screen as I can. When the option to select a video mode comes, I use mode 6, 80 columns by 60 lines. Your hardware may or may not be able to handle high resolutions like that, so experiment with it.

Once tomsrtbt has booted and you have a console, mount the ZIP® drive. It is probably a good idea to mount it read only:

# mount /dev/sda1 /mnt -o ro

Check to be sure it is there:

# ls -l /mnt

Then change to the directory where the scripts are on the ZIP® drive.

# cd /mnt/root.bin

Now run the script that will restore the partition information, e.g.:

# ./make.dev.hda

This script will:

• Clean out the first 1024 bytes of the hard drive, killing off any existing partition table and master boot record (MBR).

• Recreate the partitions from the information gathered when you ran make.fdisk.

• Make ext2 file system partitions and Linux swap partitions as appropriate.

• Make some types of FAT partitions.

• Make mount points and mount the ext2 partitions for you.

	NOTE
	If you have other operating systems to restore, now is a good time to do so. First, reboot to tomsrtbt to finish restoring Linux. You will have to remount the partitions you just built. Make a new, separate, script to mount the partitions from the tail end of the make.dev.x script.

Once you have created all your directories and mounted partitions to them, you can run the script restore.metadata. This will restore the contents of the ZIP® drive to the hard drive.

You should see a directory of the ZIP® disk's root directory, then a list of the archive files as they are restored. Tar on tomsrtbt will tell you that tar's block size is 20, and that's fine. You can ignore it. Be sure that lilo prints out its results:

Added linux *

That will be followed by the output from a "df -m" command.

If you normally boot directly to X, you could have some problems. To be safe, change your boot run level temporarily. In /target/etc/inittab, find the line that looks like this:

id:5:initdefault:

and change it to this:

id:3:initdefault:

Now, you can gracefully reboot. Remove the tomsrtbt floppy from your floppy drive if you haven't already done so, and give the computer the three fingered salute, or its equivalent:

shutdown -r now

The computer will shut down and reboot.