Why no "ls" on DVD or livefs.iso?

[Polytropon]

On Sun, 06 Oct 2013 01:29:19 -0500, W. D. wrote:
> Booted with both.  Alt-F4 to get to command line.
> 
> Very limited commands: "ls: not found".

Try /rescue/ls explicitely instead.



> Why?  What good are these disks if they don't have
> the most basic of commands?

Only live systems offer more than the "holographic shell"
when booted properly. FreeSBIE has been a very good live
system in the past, but the current installers also allow
you to drop into a working shell environment at a very
early stage (from within bsdinstall).

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/bsdinstall/bsdinstall-choose-mode.png

This dialog should bring you into a working shell. I've
been using it myself for disk initialization with a
FreeBSD 9.1 CD.



> Trying to clone a hard disk that has an number
> of bad sectors.  Trying to save most of my data.

A good approach. If possible, try to obtain a 1:1 copy
of the disk (or partition) and work with that. Check
the mailing list archives for further inspiration.




-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...