Nix wrote:

On 8 May 2007, Michael Tokarev told this:

quoted

BTW, for such recovery purposes, I use initrd (initramfs really, but
does not matter) with a normal (but tiny) set of commands inside,
thanks to busybox.  So everything can be done without any help from
external "recovery CD".  Very handy at times, especially since all
the network drivers are here on the initramfs too, so I can even
start a netcat server while in initramfs, and perform recovery from
remote system... ;)

What you should probably do is drop into the shell that's being used to
run init if mount fails (or, more generally, if after mount runs it

That's exactly what my initscript does ;)

chk() {
  while ! "$@"; do
    warn "the following command failed:"
    warn "$*"
    p="** Continue(Ignore)/Shell/Retry (C/s/r)? "
    while : ; do
      if ! read -t 10 -p "$p" x 2>&1; then
        echo "(timeout, continuing)"
        return 1
      fi
      case "$x" in
        [Ss!]*) /bin/sh 2>&1 ;;
        [Rr]*) break;;
        [CcIi]*|"") return 1;;
        *) echo "(unrecognized response)";;
      esac
    done
  done
}

chk mount -n -t proc proc /proc
chk mount -n -t sysfs sysfs /sys
...
info "mounting $rootfstype fs on $root (options: $rootflags)"
chk mount -n -t $rootfstype -o $rootflags $root /root
if [ $? != 0 ] && ! grep -q "^[^ ]\\+ /root " /proc/mounts; then
  warn "root filesystem ($rootfstype on $root) is NOT mounted!"
fi
...

hasn't ended up mounting anything: there's no need to rely on mount's
success/failure status). [...]

Well, so far exitcode has been reliable.

/mjt