VanLUG Email Archive
Ryan Land (rland@icsnet.ca)
Thu, 28 Jan 1999 12:38:19 -0800
Hi All, Hi Mike,
Mike Montour wrote:
> If there's a need (and not a good solution already somewhere on the
> Net), I could put together a bootable utility disk to do this sort
> of repair. Any interest?
Since this question has occurred several times in the past week, I am planning
on writing a short Howto and making it available under our Local Resources at
"Linux in BC". Putting together the necessary bootdisk for a standard pc
system (eide drives only) is merely a case of downloading and writing an image
to floppy. The Howto will include links to the std "bare.i" image, and I
figure we'll also add in links for people running with various scsi
controllers.
A short Lilo configuration section including example conf files would probably
also be added.
On a slightly different topic...
I indeed agree that dd is an excellant tool for both saving drive info and
cleaning it out, completely. It is however also a dangerous tool if one
doesn't read up it's correct usage... even veteran un*x users have fallen prey
to a misplaced or misordered dir name in a dd command. Not generally a good
thing.
[Why do I like dd? it once saved my life, in a big way. A dual boot system of
mine crashed in a particularly nasty way as a result of windows contracting a
virus off of a supposedly clean private network. That virus was one of them
"friendly" kinds which anihilates all partition tables on your drives, as well
as the MBR... :) Try rebuilding your partition table so you can re-enter
Linux... especially if you don't have a paper copy of their numbers. I
eventually managed it with a little data analyses and some finely tuned hit &
miss, and retrieved ALL of my data. But first I made a master copy of my drive
by dd-ing it's raw contents into large archive files, then burning them to cd.
I still have the 3 cd's as a reminder -> Play with fire, get burned. But only
once.]
If anyone has any suggested additions to the above mentioned Howto, feel free
to send them my way.
Regards,
Ryan Land
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b3 on Thu 28 Jan 1999 - 12:42:47 PST