A.P. Lawrence

This article is from a FAQ concerning SCO operating systems. While some of the information may be applicable to any OS, or any Unix or Linux OS, it may be specific to SCO Xenix, Open Desktop or Openserver.

There is lots of Linux, Mac OS X and general Unix info elsewhere on this site: Search this site is the best way to find anything.

Unix, Xenix and ODT General FAQ

How do I crash out of the install script?

(if you don't have a boot disk, see How can I download a boot disk?)

On OpenServer Release 5, boot from the boot diskette, and at the Boot: prompt, type

tools

This is not an undocumented option to the boot command, but rather a special line in /etc/default/boot on the installation diskette - so you can't use it from anywhere but your installation boot diskette.

See: http://aplawrence.com/cgi-bin/ta.pl?105094 for breaking out of the installation itself.

To get to your hard drive, you need to create the appropriate device node:

mknod /dev/root b 1 42
fsck -ofull /dev/root
mount /dev/root /mnt

Mike Pope commented:

What I did was to break out to the shell, run divvy and give the filesystems
names.  At that point a device node was created and I was able to proceed.

For older SCO Unix/Xenix/ODT releases, wait until the question early in the process that asks you what your keyboard type is. For character-mode installations, this is a regular textual prompt; for ODT, it's a box in a curses-style installation program. How to break out at this point depends on the OS. Under Xenix, press Del. Under Unix, type "shell" and press enter. Under ODT, press Control-A.

If you don't see that on a 3.2v4.2, you'll see:

1. Initial Install
2. Update
3. Exit

and THAT is where you'll type "shell".

On the old systems, you haven't got much until you get the hard drive mounted. No "ls" for example, so "echo /dev/*" is the best you can do. Once the drive is mounted, you can do "/mnt/bin/ls" etc.

Roberto Zini:

See also http://aplawrence.com/cgi-bin/ta.pl?110414

How can I generate and save a debug logfile for an SCO OpenServer 5 installation or upgrade (not strictly related but worth reading :-)