[Preston] SCSI Adaptors

[Richard Wellstead]

Hi,

 Try Knoppix 3.1, a Live CD that boots up very quickly detecting 
everything on my system and alll others i've tried it on. The kernel 
(2.4.20 IIRC) has scsi support and i think all other modules you can 
think of compiled and ready. It boots up by default to a KDE session 
and contains over 1.7Gb of software on a compressed filesystem... it 
really is an amazing cd... If you can't download it I can get you a 
copy. I also sell it on www.uselinux.co.uk along with many other cds. I 
bet it'll help in any susch situation, its the perfect rescue disk.

Regards,

 Richard

On Saturday 22 Feb 2003 18:22, Andrew King wrote:
> 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
>
>
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