[Sussex] Help with getting started please

[Jacqui Caren-home]

Desmond Armstrong wrote:
> On 11/07/10 21:00, Malcolm Harris wrote:
>> Thanks for the suggestion Desmond,
>>
>> I got an install disk burnt after 3 attempts and I think I did a 
>> partitioned install on the decrepit PC (Windoze Explorer is saying 
>> that it's disk has shrunk).......*but* unfortunately I can't get the 
>> dual boot option just cluttering clanking XP as usual!
> 
> O.K.
> Need to do a little analysis here.
> Firstly do you know what the size of the harddisk is? You may need to 
> actually look at the label on it to be sure.
> 
> Now there are a couple of things I would suggest:-
> 
> Firstly download a copy of Puppy, burn a CD and then boot from that. 
> This is a useful tool as it will show the partitions. As it runs as a 
> Live CD it does not do anything to your existing system. In fact the 
> panic button is remove the power.
> 
> Now another tool which is rather good is gparted 
> (gparted.sourceforge.net). This tool shows the partitions and you can 
> manipulate them, but be careful, very careful.

While trying to recover my local disks I used

sfdisk -s to get the size of each hard drive
then used sfdisk -l /dev/xxxxx to dislap the partitions.

i.e.
[root at dieter ~]# sfdisk -s
/dev/sda: 488386584
/dev/sdb: 1953514584
/dev/sdc: 1953514584
/dev/sde: 488386584
/dev/sdf: 1465138584
total: 6348940920 blocks
[root at dieter ~]# sfdisk -l /dev/sda

Disk /dev/sda: 60801 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors/track
Units = cylinders of 8225280 bytes, blocks of 1024 bytes, counting from 0

    Device Boot Start     End   #cyls    #blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *      0+     12      13-    104391   83  Linux
/dev/sda2         13   60800   60788  488279610   8e  Linux LVM
/dev/sda3          0       -       0          0    0  Empty
/dev/sda4          0       -       0          0    0  Empty
[root at dieter ~]#

The trick is to NOT run sfdisk without an option!

I also used a live distro that had sshd and networking.
Then I could ssh into the machine from another box and cut and paste
the output (like above) into a file. Saves having to write all of the above
guff by hand. *shudder*

Jacqui
Jacqui