[Gllug] Recovering ISOs from a FUBARed HDD

[John Winters]

Dear all,

I had an interesting problem.  The HDD failed in my school workstation,
producing so many read errors that the system could no longer boot
successfully.

I've ordered a new HDD (due tomorrow) and I have to hand some 8 day old
Mondo backup CDs, but... I knew that on the system there were some more
up to date ISOs produced by Mondo at the weekend, so I set out to see
whether I could read them off the disc.  Only one problem - the files
were on an LVM disc chunk.

I booted with Knoppix, which was fine and I could read the disc and talk
to the network, but it seems Knoppix doesn't understand LVM.

Then I booted with the Sarge installation CD.  That gave me a system
which would talk to the network *and* understood LVM, so I could see the
files I wanted to retrieve.  Unfortunately, the Sarge installation CD
doesn't seem to carry any network tools capable of shoving files over
the network.

In the end I managed to get the files by connecting a large USB HDD and
copying them off whilst booted from the Sarge installation CD.

Now my question - is there any way I could have done it if I hadn't had
the USB device to hand?  Any way of getting those files over the network
using either Knoppix or the Sarge installation CD?

TIA,
John

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