[Linux-Anyway] Re: Can't mount drive
- From: Meph Istopheles <meph@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: Linux-Anyway@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 29 Apr 2004 11:36:33 -0700 (PDT)
> > > Might be, because dd copies media bitwise, and doesn't need
> > > it to be mounted in order to do so. Although, I'm afraid
> > > that you'll make yourself just another copy that you can't
> > > mount. It's worth a shot, probably, in case it's some kind
> > > of hardware problem (and in case it won't make dd fail
> > > too).
> > Hadn't thought of that. Damn. ~How~ am I to get the
> > data...?
> Well, the $coppers and the $gestapo of all countries seem to be
> able to extract data even from bent platters of a HD run over
> by a steam roller, so there certainly are means. If the data
> means your or the livelihood of your brother's, I'm certain
> that there are organisations that'll extract it for a $fee (so
> you can pay up and kick yourself for not having backed up ;o)
> ).
Remember who you're talking to;-). I'd considered this with
some 5.25 floppies with lots of data I'd extracted for a book I
was working on, only I'd done it in WordStar 2.0 for cp/m. I'd
later found a Linux emulator because the cost of getting the data
outstretched the value of the data, but I couldn't get it to even
work, let alone open it in StarOffice (which, theoretically,
~should~ have opened -- if I'd been successful in getting the
data to begin with -- as the base code of StarOffice isn't that
different from the same coder's (or group of coders) in WordStar
(some incarnations later, it was still the same company, & I
understand some of the same coders of WordStar were in charge of
making it into the office app StarOffice).
> Otherwise, I'd do a google on something like "linux data
> recovery rescue" (without the quotes, of course). There are
> tools for this, you only need to find them.
Chances are, I'll just run some repair utilities on it,
repartition & format it. If it were for me, I'd throw the damn
thing out the window, buy a new drive & go from there. The P-II
333 would make a very nice Web server. But "even cheaper"
brother will deal with the 8.5GB boot & 500MB data disk, as he
can't be bothered to read even the simplest of Web pages for
configuring something like a Web browser to his liking. He'd
much rather complain to me that it doesn't work -- long after
he'd found it "broken", I might add.
> > The drive itself is, but I'd already partitioned his hda
> > for Windows. It seems his cdrom has died, so next day off he
> > has, I plan to bring him one of the old spares I have here, &
> > see if we can get the thing installed with an OS.
> Bring along a Knoppix CD and see if you can mount the drive in
> his machine. If it works, you can copy the data to his hda.
> Remember, Knoppix mounts drives readonly, so to gain write
> access to the hda, you have to do:
> mount /dev/hdax /mnt/hdax -o remount,rw
Excellent. Assuming his motherboard, bios, or cable isn't the
actual problem, once I get the spare cdrom going, this would be
the way to do it. Thanks.
> > On a related note, I'm also trying to get an iso off a cd
> > transferred to the hard drive as an iso. Both Windows &
> > Linux read it & ls or dir return the files & directories in
> > the iso. How would I transfer that to the hard drive?
> There's an instruction on this in Godwin's CD-Burning Howto. In
> a nutshell:
> 1) Mount the drive and do a df to get the size of the CD
> 2) Divide the size of the CD by 2
> 3) Unmount the CD (rather important, I'd say)
> 4) Use the size/2 value as a count argument to dd like this:
> dd if=/dev/hdx of=~/image.iso bs=2048 count=xxxxxx
> if being of course the device file of your cdrom, and of the
> path to where you want to have the image stored.
Whee! That's it. Thanks. Scott will thank you too soon;-).
> > [...] Curious, if one made an install, configured it, etc;
> > then did this dd to a drive which is only a little larger
> > than the data on the installed disk, would there be any
> > problems if the install went wonky, & one partition &
> > formatted the disk & dd'd the data fromt he small, back-up
> > drive to the install drive...? I'm thinking that something
> > to do with drive sizes & sectors, etc might get screwy, but
> > then it's only a ghost of what was on the larger drive....
> I think that dd is smart enough to deal with this (or that the
> drives are smart enough). As far as I understand it, it would
> copy everything including MBR and partition tables over, so any
> formatting on the target disc would just go away. If I prepared
> a disc to be ghosted in this way, I'd limit the number of
> partitions so that I could add a partition/partitions extending
> over the rest of the bigger disc.
Cool. I'll hold onto this & play with it after I move. Good
project, & a good idea for a crash-box:-).
> > Ah, of all things 'puter, I think hard drive physics confuse
> > me most.
> Same here.
Nice to know I'm not alone. The only reason I didn't take the
Linux cert test was because of the hard drive knowledge
requirements. Ever looked at the lessons on that? The test
requres onle know things about hard drives NO admin would expect
a low-level admin help desk operator to know -- particularly when
there's software which would do anything one needed to know about
those advanced hard drive subjects faster & more effectively than
one would manually. I found it all too stupid.
> I believe it's intended to be transparent, but inconsistencies
> in the implementation make it necessary to deal with. So a
> certain level of expertise seems to come in very handy. Well, I
> don't have it.
I vaguely remember reading something about drives "magically"
knowing these things & compensating. Still, it gets all muddled
when reading of hard drives. I must have a block;-).
--
Death to all fanatics!
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