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I have created a new Fedora live USB with the intention of booting into rescue mode and fixing the bootloader, so that I can dualboot win7 and Fedora 20. However, I do not understand how I am to boot into rescue mode, seeing as the installation boot prompt is not shown as described by the guide, I am taken directly to the installation process.

Pressing tab when given the option to run Fedora Live allows me write stuff in a terminalish thingy, but writing

linux rescue

simply starts the Fedora Live as usual. Some sources claim that I need the DVD, not the LiveUSB. I will try this shortly.

2 Answers 2

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When you boot the live distros you'll typically get a screen like this:

   ss of grub boot menu

When you get to this screen just hit the Esc key which will bring up the grub boot prompt from where you can type linux rescue.

Additional boot options are covered here in this Fedora document titled: 7.1.3. Additional Boot Options.

References

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  • This seems to be working as far as I guess only up to Fedora 20. I couldn't voluntarily get into linux rescue on a Fedora 35 live USB nor Fedora 37 installed. There's no rescue command any longer. Mar 15 at 9:15
  • @propatience - Will require more research but I found this discussion on it - reddit.com/r/Fedora/comments/wfr5hu/….
    – slm
    Mar 17 at 14:41
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When a system is too damaged to permit booting from the hard disk drive, it's necessary to boot from another medium. The Fedora installation discs support a "Rescue mode" in which the system is booted from the CD and the hard disk partitions are optionally mounted for access.

To access this mode, boot from your Fedora install media and select "Rescue installed system" from the boot menu using the arrow keys and Enter or by pressing the R key (if you need to edit the boot options first -- to disable ACPI, for example -- navigate to the Rescue option with the arrow keys and press Tab).

The kerenel will boot from CD and the system will prompt you to select a keyboard style and language from scrollable lists of options. You will then be given the opportunity to enable the network interfaces on the system, either by entering the IP information or by using DHCP.

The system will then present a dialog stating that the rescue environment is about to find and mount the filesystems from your hard disk Fedora installation, and asks if you wish to continue. This is a critical question: if your filesystems are intact and you wish to access the data that is in them, you can select Continue, the default option. If you are concerned about the state of your filesystems and want to ensure that they will not be altered, but still want to access them, select Read-Only. If your filesystems are damaged, you have multiple Fedora installations, or you wish to perform an operation such as reducing the size of the root filesystem, choose Skip. After some additional messages, you will be presented with a root shell prompt. If you have elected to continue with read/write mounting of your filesystems, all of the files from your Fedora installation should be available under /mnt/sysimage -- so the normal /etc/passwd file will be available at /mnt/sysimage/etc/passwd.

Although regular Fedora commands and utilities are available in rescue mode, most of them will not work because of the altered paths. You can work around this issue by temporarily changing the root directory using the chroot command:

chroot /mnt/sysimage

However, you need to be aware that files within the mounted Fedora filesystems will not have been updated during the rescue mode boot process, including /etc/mtab and /var/log/messages. You can compensate for this by some degree by getting the information from other places (such as dmesg for kernel messages and /proc/mounts for mount information).

If you have been forced to use rescue mode because your system's Grub bootloader code has become damaged or has been overwritten by another bootloader, you can reinstall the Grub bootloader in rescue mode:

Start the Grub shell with the grub command:

grub

Probing devices to guess BIOS drives. This may take a long time.

GNU GRUB version 0.97 (640K lower / 3072K upper memory)

[ Minimal BASH-like line editing is supported. For the first word, TAB lists possible command completions. Anywhere else TAB lists the possible completions of a device/filename.] grub>

Use the find command to locate the partition containing the boot files by searching for /grub/grub.conf (or /boot/grub/grub.conf if that fails). Grub will report the partition using its own syntax:

grub> find /grub/grub.conf (hd0,0)

Use the root command to configure the partition from which the boot files are to be loaded (use the partition ID from step 2):

grub> root (hd0,0) Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83

The partition ID from step 2 can be converted to a drive ID by removiing the comma and partition number -- for example, the partition (hd0,0) is on the drive (hd0). Use the setup command with this drive ID to install the Grub bootloader code:

grub> setup (hd0)

Checking if "/boot/grub/stage1" exists... no Checking if "/grub/stage1" exists... yes Checking if "/grub/stage2" exists... yes Checking if "/grub/e2fs_stage1_5" exists... yes Running "embed /grub/e2fs_stage1_5 (hd0)"... 16 sectors are embedded. succeeded Running "install /grub/stage1 (hd0) (hd0)1+16 p (hd0,0)/grub/stage2 /grub/grub.conf"... succeeded Done.

Exit the Grub shell with quit:

grub> quit

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  • So the whole entry was just wholesale copied from the (now deleted) link? How is that not plagiarism? Mar 9 at 15:57

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