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Linux Disk Recovery

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by sridharpandu 1 view

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My PC has two HDD's. One had Windows NT and the other had RH 9.x. I had configured GRUB that was supplied with RH for dual boot. Subsequently I upgraded the Win NT to Windows 2000 this erased GRUB and dual boot was removed. However I created a boot disk to boot my linux disk. One day For some strange reason the Linux Disk failed to boot saying the boot record is corrupted.

I tried retrieving my data (mostly mails in Netscape) by connecting to another Linux machine as a slave but the machine hangs and sometimes throws stack overflow messages.

I then tried upgrading the version of linux by preserving the data it displays the error that it cannot mount CD ROM on HDA.

I need help in recovering my mails from this Linux disk. Any suggesstions.

Best regards,

Sridhar Pandurangiah

10 replies

by rindi1

You could try downloading knoppix (http://www.knoppix.com), a fully working debian version on CD, with plenty of tools installed. Then boot your Knoppix and try to mount your discs from there. If you are able to read them, you should be able to save your data to some other media or a place on the network.

by Member 36395912

If you still have your installation disks, insert disk 1. You should be able to use the linux rescue option.
Linux rescue sets up in ram. Knowledge of the hardware is necessary to determine which hard drive to mount. This is all command-line stuff. This means you are all powerful, but a mistake will be catastrophic.
#?>fdisk -l /dev/hdx (ide primary channel master is "a", slave is "b"; ide secondary channel master is "c", slave is "d".) This command will list the partitions which are located on the specified device.
When you locate your swap-partition:
#?>/sbin/swapon /dev/hdx# (this will give you the room necessary to be able to mount the other partitions of the hard drive.)
With a working swap-partition you can create as many mount-points (empty directories in /mnt) as you like to explore the hard drive.
"fsck" (look up the usage of fsck on the internet--you do NOT want it to automatically attempt to repair the file-system yet. If the reported file-system type is not for linux or unknown (do not fsck your swap-partition or any mounted partition) STOP!!! Unplug the hard drive and take it to someone who really knows what they are doing. I will not walk you through that type of recovery.
If your partitions are detected as the correct type and size then you can fsck them without adding the options to prevent it from attempting repair.
RH-9 generally duplicates boot-up information in "/etc/lilo.conf". mount /mnt/sysimage/etc /etc; /sbin/lilo

by Member 36395912

google linux questions
Learn to manually install using appropriate partitioning so as to have each important directory residing in a separate partition. Keep all partition information somewhere safe, and leave some unpartitioned space on a drive. This makes recovery possible in most cases. It makes it possible (with luck) even in the event of hard drive failure. It is strongly recommended to do similar things on windows machines as well--for the same reasons.

by sridharpandu

Used Windows XP and installed explore2fs, the Linux file system utility for Windows NT. Recovered the mail boxes using this.

Thanks for all the help. I was desperate at that time. Thanks once again to all who have taken the trouble to send mail, post answers here etc.

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