Booting NOT-Windows

[Bill McGonigle]

On Aug 20, 2008, at 14:25, Peg Harris wrote:

> Since this machine has the ability to boot off a USB device or a  
> CD, I wonder if I can boot up something else that will see all of  
> my other disks, and let me copy my XP files onto my USB drive  
> before I end up shipping this machine back to Dell (who said they'd  
> just blindly replace the hard drive) or reinstalling from scratch.

If your filesystem is really hosed, it's possible that not all your  
files will copy off easily.  You may or may not get error messages in  
this case.  This entirely depends on what caused your problem, which  
we don't know.

So, one thing I like to do is to create a disk image of the damaged  
disk before trying anything else.  That way you can go back if  
'recovery' attempts do more damage than good.  This is largely a  
question of what your data is worth and what your risk aversion is  
like.  NewEgg recently had $500GB disk on sale for $50, so we're not  
talking very expensive here.

Once booted with the live cd, you'd do something like:

   dd if=/dev/sda of=/mnt/myusbdisk/my_hosed_xp_disk.dd bs=8M  
conv=noerror,sync

and let it run for an hour or two.  Then do the recover attempt.   
Restoring the disk to its previous state is a matter of flipping the  
if (input file) and of (output file) labels above.  And waiting.   
Assuming your drive heads haven't crashed - then all bets are off as  
far as predictable behaviour.

-Bill

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