Recovering From a Failed Installation
To help recover from a failed installation or a broken system, the installation program has a limited set of utilities you can use. After bringing up the installed system and logging on, do not use the rhsetup command. Instead, type loaddasd.sh which brings up your DASD partitions. To mount the partitions, use, for example, mount -t ext2 /dev/dasda1 /mnt/dest. You can then make any changes required to that mounted partition. Here are a few other helpful hints about other utilities on the initial install ramdisk
The boot loader utility, zipl is the S/390 equivalent to the x86 utility, LILO. Modify /etc/zipl.conf when changes are made to the kernel or configuration prior to running zipl.
Note To properly operate this utility you must first change root into the mounted previously installed system (e.g. chroot /mnt/dest).
The format utility with a text based interface, dasdformat, can be used to reformat individual or multiple DASD partitions simultaneously. (dasdformat will make all formatted filesystems use the ext2 filesystem). To change the filesystem type use fdasd, the S/390 equivalent to the x86 utility fdisk.
dasdfmt is the command line utility to individually format a DASD. Following a dasdfmt, run fdasd.
mke2fs or mkswap will create a swap partition. This partition type that is chosen must coincide with what is setup using fdasd.