I have searched for a howto/guide/documentation for using the Leap DVD Recsue system & can’t find a thing.
Can anyone point me to it? Or, a good old one?
I don’t need it right now, but, you never know!
The rescue disks are just a bunch of utility programs that are useful for recovery.
I haven’t tried it with Leap.
You just boot the DVD, and select “rescue system” from the boot menu.
That boots you to a command line, where you login as root (the password is null (the empty string).
Yes but, after that does not one have to do some tricky file system mount & chroot, etc? Looking for a guide…and, have not found anything as yet.
yep depends on what is wrong. You do need to know a little about the normal utilities in Linux. There is no one click fix it anywhere I know of in Linux
Maybe see a rescue system as a toolbox which you can open and use the tools from while at the same time, the normal system is not running.
And like any toolbox, it depends on what to do/repair that decides which tools to use. As in all computing, there is no magic, only hard work.
Thanks for the link! Helps!
However, I cannot find Leap Help, as in, Suse Help, icon on desktop in earlier distros. Thus, when I go to /usr/share/doc I find a paucity of info; /usr/share/doc/HTML/en has only 31 categories whereas earlier versions filled a page or so, As I recall there should be a howto folder there & nothing on rescue either.
Regarding the link:
Somewhere I recall something like:
At the Rescue#
Mount root
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt
assumes root on sda1
Mount other devices
mount --bind /dev /mnt/dev
Chroot
chroot /mnt
Then, for 12.3 and earlier
mount /proc
mount /sys
For 13.1 it changed
mount -t proc proc /proc
mount -t sysfs sysfs /sys
And then, you should be able to run YAST from the command line to affect the installed system.
My point is that there was a significant change @ 13.1
And, being there is a significant change from 13.2 to Leap 42.1, what are those changes and how do those changes affect the rescue system?
Where is it documented?
Does it work like SLED12? I don’t know as I have not installed/played with SLED12.
Just a few things to be thinking of…
Yes. But if you use “–bind” mounts for “/sys” and “/proc”, you won’t have to worry about those changes.
OK, I see the question behind your question now. But mounting your systems partitions and chrooting to it is only part of the things you can do. And you only need it for certain types of problems.
For problems with file systems e.g. you do NOT mount them at all, but you ruin fsck or any other means to repair them.
It realy dependss on the type of problem what you are using from your toolbox on the patient under anaesthesia. our spceific proble is apperently one where the system is can not be booted, but is rather healthy otherwise.
Prior to Leap 42.1, openSUSE produced a separate rescue CD (IIRC an Xfce liveCD) usually each release has a version. I found it useful in rescuing Tumbleweed from a kernel/btrfs bug some time ago. They probably will not produce Leap’s for a while until any early bugs in tools have been squashed.
In the meantime you could take a look at “SystemRescueCD” at SystemRescue - System Rescue Homepage It’s a Gentoo based liveCD with a very good collection of GUI and CLI tools, editors, file managers, Gparted, and a browser (useful for accessing good documentation during rescue). Used it several times before the openSUSE one and since, no experience of Gentoo needed - it’s Linux based. Their website has useful documentation and articles/howto’s. I would recommend it, as it’s useful cross-distro including Windows. 
Many thanks for the insight
Thanks, much appreciated! I have a lot of the older ones; my problem is getting them to boot on my newer systems. On my x-99 Viper, I had to go into bios and allow it to boot foreign OS to even get the Leap install DVD to run – didn’t have that problem with 13.2. On my HP 17T laptop, I have no access to the BIOS for uefi/secureboot so any live CD/ rescue CD must meet M$ uefi/secureboot spec
I do have the latest Parted Magic and it boots in both with no intervention. The 13.2 KDE Live & Rescue CDs boot in both systems well.
Somewhere, I read that the Rescue CDs need to be the same kernel flavor, so for now, that leaves me with the leap install DVD Rescue system should I need it.
Thanks everyone for your insight.
In most cases, I doubt that. If that was true, how could SystemRescueCD be used by Windows users and many have done so.
I can think of one area with a similar problem in the past. Rescuing a corrupted Btrfs root file system when the Btrfs tools were still being developed and were buggy. SystemRescueCD’s kernel is not usually the very latest (not in itself the problem), but the Btrfs tools were not the latest fixed-up version. That actually happened when even openSUSE’s rescue CD didn’t have the latest Btrfs tool version. I had to use a Factory rescue CD to fix an old Tumbleweed Btrfs system corrupted by kernel bug. That was unique to openSUSE and possibly Arch Linux at that time.
I found:
Appendix A. Help and Troubleshooting Submitted by tbazant on Thu, 11/07/2013 - 15:12
Applies to openSUSE 13.1
A Help and Troubleshooting
at
https://activedoc.opensuse.org/book/opensuse-start-up/appendix-a-help-and-troubleshooting
See: para A.2.7.1 Using the Rescue System #](https://activedoc.opensuse.org/book/opensuse-start-up/appendix-a-help-and-troubleshooting#sec.trouble.data.recover.rescue)
I knew that I had seen it somewhere!
I didn’t doubt you had seen it. I just don’t think it’s a good enough reason for not deploying or relying on a general purpose rescue liveCD with a wider range of diagnostic tools. Ideally, it’s better to have more than one option or liveCD. Let’s hope there will be a Leap rescue CD produced.
Thanks for the link - I will read it - I still run 13.1 
If we are on the same page, that Warning applies to a limation using chroot, and also includes this statement:
Most often the rescue kernel version differs from the installed one — then you cannot simply access a sound card, for example. It is also not possible to start a graphical user interface.
Many rescues don’t require chroot, although you can also do it from SystemRescueCD and they do explain how to do it. I guess the same limitation would apply, but one can check their documentation to be sure.
Looks like some of the Devs are working on it. Yea! This thread starting @
http://lists.opensuse.org/archive/opensuse-factory/2015-11/msg00315.html
It’s a long read, but most interesting.
Err not quite, no dev volunteered yet. Instead someone suggested Carlos (or anyone) could try to do it with suse studio. It seems at this time he’s still 900 slices (packages actually) short of a full loaf.