Booting NOT-Windows

[Peg Harris]

Thanks to all of you!  You are my heros this evening!

I copied the Knoppix kit to my desktop, made a CD and booted off that.  Once 
I plugged in my USB external disk, I was able to do a simple drag & copy. 
When I plugged the USB disk into my XP desktop, I was able to open some 
random files easily.

Now that I've got a backup of the files that are important enough not to 
want to lose off the XP disk, I'm going to try the parallel install (or, as 
Dell support called it, a "dirty install") with no disk reformatting.

I knew there had to be an easier solution than what I was trying before! 
Thanks again.

Peg


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Bill McGonigle" <bill at bfccomputing.com>
To: "Peg Harris" <TechWtr at handspun.com>
Cc: <gnhlug-discuss at mail.gnhlug.org>
Sent: Wednesday, August 20, 2008 8:13 PM
Subject: Re: Booting NOT-Windows


> 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
>
> -----
> Bill McGonigle, Owner           Work: 603.448.4440
> BFC Computing, LLC              Home: 603.448.1668
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