drive recovery of dual-boot system

David Hardy belovedbold357 at gmail.com
Thu Jan 26 11:21:52 EST 2012


Not only Dell desktops, but I just ran into the same issue of not being
able to boot from a CD on an HP machine, which boots fine from a USB stick.
 Also had problems bringing up the BIOS with the keyboard plugged into a
USB hub but it worked fine when connected directly to the box for some
reason.

This was all a result of trying to replace an existing o.s. with CentOS on
the HP box, and despite booting from the stick it froze on kernel panic
right away.   So I did a netinstall from the CentOS site and it worked like
a charm.   For any future sys rescue work, I will have to use the USB stick
versions, I guess.



On Thu, Jan 26, 2012 at 9:40 AM, Greg Rundlett (freephile) <
greg at freephile.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Jan 26, 2012 at 2:35 AM, Mike Bilow <mikebw at colossus.bilow.com>wrote:
>
>> Filesystems (and therefore "fsck" targets) reside on partitions of the
>> disk, something like "/dev/sdc3", rather than the entire device (or an
>> image of it). This is inherent in the design of the system and is
>> independent of the types of filesystems or how they are mixed.
>>
>>
> Thanks Mike, I knew that, but somehow thought that there was some magic
> that I didn't know or understand that would make the computer do what I
> wanted as opposed to what I told it to do :-)
>
>
>> In order to access partitions within an image file, you want the "kpartx"
>> utility:
>>
>>    http://linux.die.net/man/8/**kpartx<http://linux.die.net/man/8/kpartx>
>
>
> Ahh, that's the part that was missing from all the tutorials/manpages/faqs
> that I've read.
>
>
>>
>> Also, those annoying Dell machines that will not boot from CD will boot
>> from USB Flash memory, and it is easy to make one up with SysRescueCD:
>>
>>    http://www.sysresccd.org/**Sysresccd-manual-en_How_to_**
>> install_SystemRescueCd_on_an_**USB-stick<http://www.sysresccd.org/Sysresccd-manual-en_How_to_install_SystemRescueCd_on_an_USB-stick>
>>
>> Thanks, I plan to give that a try and I'm also going to investigate
> setting up a computer on USB stick for my kids.
>
>
>>  On 2012-01-26 00:47, Greg Rundlett (freephile) wrote:
>>
>>> I have an internal hard drive that won't boot.
>>>
>> [snip]
>
>>  The bad drive in question is 250GB and has a number of partitions and
>>> file system types:
>>>
>> [snip]
>
>>    Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
>>> /dev/sdc1               1           7       56196   de  Dell Utility
>>> /dev/sdc2               8        1966    15728640    7  HPFS/NTFS
>>> /dev/sdc3   *        1966        5881    31453961    7  HPFS/NTFS
>>> /dev/sdc4            5882       30401   196956900    5  Extended
>>> /dev/sdc5            5882       29402   188932401   83  Linux
>>> /dev/sdc6           29403       30401     8024436   82  Linux swap /
>>> Solaris
>>>
>>> I succeeded in creating a copy of the Linux partition using ddrescue
> (also called gddrescue in Ubuntu).  There were a few errors found and
> corrected by fsck.  I'll post more details later but at this point I'm
> pretty happy to have my data.
>
> ~ Greg
>
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