"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."