[Preston] SCSI Adaptors

[Andrew King]

Hi all,

Had a bit of a scenario at work today. The idiot who was there before me 
set up the shared area so that all staff had delete permission for all 
of it, and the inevitable has happened. Since I'm only halfway through 
replacing our backup system and haven't yet thought about what needs 
backing up other than user home directories and essential directories 
like \\pdc\netlogon, c:\winnt\repair, and so on (and since management 
won't do anything to get me more time per week to sort out these 
problems despite having known about them for months), there isn't a backup.

Recovering files from an NTFS formatted drive using only Free Software 
is easy - as long as they're there - no problem. (Any fool knows how to 
do that, right?)  I could, however, do with getting hold of an image of 
this partition.  It's 17GB, NTFS formatted, and stored on a SCSI disk on 
an NT server, and the problem (aside from it being at work and me having 
next week off, unless they let me change that) is getting a Linux distro 
to see the scsi controller and give me the /dev/sd?? files.

So far, all that's managed to see it is Tom's RootBoot 1.0.103. So I 
booted the server off this with an IDE drive plugged in, ran:

mount /dev/hda1 /mnt
dd if=/dev/sdb5 of=/mnt/scsidisk.img bs=1024 count=20000000

...and left it overnight. However, when I came back the next morning, dd 
had only done the first 2GB of the disk. I'd wondered if it'd do this, 
since I thought I'd read somewhere about a limitation in ext2 on 2GB.

I also took an IDE disk with Red Hat 8.0 installed on it, and booted the 
server off it. Kudzu ran lots of times during bootup, since the hardware 
was all different, and noticed the SCSI controller: it's an Adaptec 
AIC-7896, iirc. It asked me if it should configure it, so I selected 
"yes", but the scsi drives (/dev/sd??) weren't available.

So I guess the two options are:

- Is there a filesystem that I can format the IDE disk to so that Tom's 
will support it and support a 17GB file?

- If I install debian, red hat or mandrake on this machine, can anyone 
say if (and how?) it'll make the scsi controller work?  Toms Rootboot 
proves that it is possible, but this isn't the first time I've tried to 
get other things to see it.

This is probably stuff I can work out with enough time, but people will 
be using the server as from Tuesday, and the more they use it, the more 
chance there is that those files get overwritten. The best chance is if 
I can get in Monday morning and be able to get that image file before 
the building closes for the day. If anyone's got any ideas that'll solve 
it, I'll get you a pint or two.

Thanks,

Andrew