Re: [UUG/MLUG] WOOPS!

[Tymm Twillman <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

Well, things *might* be recoverable to some degree.  Try running fsck
manually on the root partition from your boot disk.  If this doesn't work,
you may be able to at least recover some important (mostly text) files if
you know some keywords; you can "less" the hard drive partition and use
"/" to look for specific things and do some cut and paste, for text sorts
of things.  There may be some better tools out there for doing some of
this; I'm not really sure.  ext2fs does drop a bunch of superblocks around
so there's a good chance that fsck can do a bit of recovery for you
though.  At least it't the RH-installed binaries, etc. that will generally
get blown away first in a situation like this...


P.S. why did you need a DOS boot disk?

On Fri, 5 Mar 1999, Scott Greathouse wrote:

> I just gave ARC's web server a lobotamy, or so it seems. I'll tell you
> the whole story, to educate the newbies (like me) and to entertain those
> who will easily see where I went wrong...
> All I wanted to do was upgrade KDE. So I used my Mandrake 5.3 CD, and
> tried upgrading from the command line. When I got to kdebase, it told me
> that I needed some Mandrake files to install it. The Mandrake files
> refused to be installed, even with "--force" so I decided it would be
> fine to just upgrade the whole thing, as I had done with my home system
> the night before. So I needed a DOS boot disk... a fellow employee
> generously offered me a Windows 98 rescue disk. Yes, this is where it
> gets interesting. The Windows 98 rescue disk examined the hard drive and
> noted that "Drive C:" was not a Windows partition. "Oh, well," it said,
> "I'm going to write a big old stupid Microsoft thing to it anyway!" and
> it proceded to do so. Then, when I tried to upgrade, the upgrade program
> said that there was no kernel on my root partition, so it just couldn't
> do an upgrade. I rebooted with a linux boot disk and the machine is
> running quite nicely without a brain (serving up webpages, running SSH
> and the whole 9-yards), but I would really like to recover the root
> partition. I would also like to know how to mount a directory on my MLUG
> account as an NFS drive so that I can "cp -a /home /nfsmount" thereby
> keeping all of the user's stuff intact (including the httpd). I could
> copy it all to a Novell machine pretty easily, but this would eliminate
> the ownership information and permissions. A good explanation of what,
> exactly, that Win98 rescue disk did to my poor machine might be
> interesting, too.
> Any help will be greatly appreciated. I'm just glad it isn't an
> emergency (since the server doesn't seem to know that anything is
> wrong).
> Thanks,
> Scott
> 
> --
> Scott Greathouse
> Research Coordinator
> Assessment Resource Center
> (573) 882-2963
> 
>