Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"Yeah, yeah, I guess I gotta admit that not being able to mount root is a perfectly reasonable kernel panic."

"Hmm. The obvious thing to try here is booting from a rescue floppy such as tomsrtbt since I don't care as much about the root partition in this case as I do about the others."

"Oh, right. No floppy drive. No biggie; there's a whole stack of them over there on the other side of that ... pile of obstacles."

"Waitaminute: this looks like a second IDE port here -- where do I plug in the floppy cable? How much newer than most of my machines is this, if it doesn't have a floppy controller on the motherboard?"

"Hmph. Okay, I know I have PC/XT floppy controller cards in one of these boxes; I knew there was some reason I hadn't thrown them out."

"Hold on -- is this motherboard old enough to have at least one ISA/EISA slot to put the controller card in? Should I start instituting a minimum-age policy for hardware I take in to make sure I can plug in parts that I have? (Nah. Want speed, want RAM. Parts bin will catch up eventually, I suppose. Still need Sun KVM cables though.)"

"Maybe I should plug in an IDE CD-ROM and boot DSL instead? I don't remember which tools are and aren't in DSL, off the top of my head, but it ought to be a superset of tomsrtbt since a CD is bigger than a floppy, right?"

"Riiight. This just became a 'tomorrow' job. Not really something to tackle late in the second day awake due to insomnia (*grrrrr*) last night. 'Mañana, inshallah.' (...to commit a possibly unforgivable cultural 'mashup'.)"

"(Can I boot from a thumbdrive? I bet tomsrtbt will fit on one of those. I'll probably find a big enough one lying in the street one of these days, what with them being given away as promotional freebies.) Oh stop thinking and go to sleep already."