[Sussex] Good tip for recovering from catastrophe

[Geoff Teale]

Morning SLUGS,

As those who are on the INSIDErs list will be aware my development machine
(A debian "Woody" laptop that can't travel) died quite spectaculary on
Wedneday night.  A major chunk of the hard drive was unrecoverably
corrupted, the parallel and serial ports died and two PCIMCIA slots fried
(taking a 3COM Network adapter with them).

I tried booting from a debian install disk in order to recover the data but
unfortunately it proved beyond my skills to get the CDwriter working when I
couldn't install a kernel with IDE-SCSI enabled (my plan was to burn a CD of
the surviving data as I couldn't get network connectivity through a dead
NIC).  

Just as I was about to give up I remembered the DVD off the front of this
months LINUX Format.  THe DVD very handily has a LINUX distro (Knoppix) that
is bootable from CD/DVD and requires no installation on it (much like the
SuSE 7.3 trial editions).  Knoppix boots of the DVD and does all the
hardware detection and such like you'd expect of a SuSE or Mandrake
distribution.  When it finished booting (this takes quite some time) you are
presented with an KDE3 desktop (with mosfet liquid).  My local partitions
and disk drives where all available to mount of the desktop and most
importantly of all a plethora of software was provided.  TO my astonishment
my CDWriter was setup correctly (a feat only SuSE 8.0 has ever managed
automagically before) and the CDBakeOven GUI frontend for mkisofs and
cdrecord was available (which saved me remembering how to use mkisofs).  

Net result was that within 10 minutes of shoving the DVD in the machine I
had recovered everything in my home directory onto a CDR (which is
significantly better than the backup I did a couple of weeks back) and had
it ready to go onto my nice, clean Gentoo box.

On that note I wrote a very nice little Python script (Python because
Gentoo's base spec always has Python (for emerge / portage) but doesn't have
Ruby) that returns my Gentoo box to a clean spec by unmerging anything I
don't have in my "base" specification, archiving any config files used by
the unmerged programs and clearing down any directories under /home/* that
are listed as protected.  This is a nice way of returning the box to a "new
build" condition when it gets a little crufty.


Anyhow.  All I can say is that I'm going to keep the Knoppix DVD around for
occasions such as this.  What I would normally view as a toy for
demonstrations proved to be very useful tool.

-- 
Geoff Teale
geoff.teale at claybrook.co.uk
 


The above information is confidential to the addressee and may be privileged.  Unauthorised access and use is prohibited.
 
Internet communications are not secure and therefore this Company does not accept legal responsibility for the contents of this message.
 
If you are not the intended recipient, any disclosure, copying, distribution or any action taken or omitted to be taken in reliance on it, is prohibited and may be unlawful.
 
Claybrook Computing Limited is a subsidiary of Claybrook Computing (Holdings) Limited
Registered Office: Abbey House. 282 Farnborough Road, Farnborough, Hampshire GU14 7NJ
Registered in England and Wales No 1287205
 
A Hogg Robinson plc company