[Gllug] Recovering ISOs from a FUBARed HDD

[John Edwards]

On Mon, Jun 13, 2005 at 05:19:15PM +0100, John Winters wrote:
> 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?

If it's a trusted network then you could use netcat to pull it across.
The current Debian Sarge CD has nc symlinked to busybox.

On the machine with the files:
	nc -l -p 12345 -c "cat file"

On another machine:
	nc machine1 12345 > file

Netcat on the first machine will quit after finishing the cat and 
closing the connection.

It's not secure or 100% reliable, but can get you out of a jam when 
you don't have SSH available. Check md5sum or file sizes afterwards 
would be recommended.


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|    John Edwards   Email: john at cornerstonelinux.co.uk    |
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