[Wylug-help] Woe is me! I am undone! Semi OT

[James Holden]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Anne Wilson wrote:
| I had a cpu fan failure which appears to have caused other damage
| before I could power down, so I had to rebuild with a new mobo, cpu
| and ram.  Since I had to start again I installed Mandrake 10 with a
| 2.6 kernel - and all the adjustments that are needed when getting a
| new distro/kernel to behave as you want.

Oh dear. It's annoying when that happens. You forget just how much you
fiddle with stuff until it's right. I do system backups (everything but
/home) on to DAT tape whenever I do any major changes.

| Then I discovered that data which had been in vfat partitions is
| unreadable. Not all of it - which is really odd.  One partition looks
| completely empty. That is a blow, but not life-threatening.  The
| other one is much more serious.  I can see directories, and some of
| those directories contain data. Unfortunately the half-dozen files
| that I need were all in the top level directory, and I can see no
| files at all there.  It's hard to formulate a strategy when you can't
| understand what is causing the problem.

This is a shot in the dark, but have you set the BIOS translation
differently on the new motherboard? The setting that goes 'LBA',
'LARGE', 'NORMAL'. Maybe I'm behind the times here though. I don't do
much hardware stuff these days because most of my hardware is decidely
middle-ages. A P3-500 albeit with loads of RAM is more than adequate for
what I need.

| Unbelievable, the old box onto which I had put a backup of the big
| file - that took me 1.5 days to prepare - had a hard drive failure at
| the same time.

Lightening does strike twice I'm afraid. Quite frequently in situations
like this :-(

| Has anyone seen a situation like this?  The only thing I can think of
| now is to use the existing old windows partition to reinstall
| windows, then see if I can put an undelete app onto that partition
| (the data is not on that partition).  If Mandrake can't see the data
| there doesn't seem any chance that Knoppix could.  I know it's a slim
| chance that it's only the naming system that has gone wrong, but I
| can't think of anything else, and I'm now desperate.

Well, other than the BIOS settings I mentioned, I'm not sure. I'd
hesitate to let loose on the drive with MS's shoddy utilities.

You might try and see if FreeDOS can read the partition. The rule is of
course not to let anything write to the partition unless it's definately
going to fix it.

If you have a larger disk in another machine you can always transfer an
image of the partition. You could do this with ftp like so:

b0rkedpc # ftp bigdiskpc
User: you
Password: whatever
ftp> cd /somewhere/with/enough/space
CWD Command Successful
ftp> bi
Binary mode selected
ftp> put "dd if=/dev/hda1 bs=1M" imagefile

This will run dd on the machine containing the duff partition and
transfer a copy of the data via FTP to a file on a remote machine
('bigdiscpc').

You could also mount the image file like so:

bigdiscpc # mkdir -p /mnt/image
bigdiscpc # mount -t vfat -o loop /wherever/you/put/the/imagefile /mnt/image

Not that it really helps you now, but rsync is great for backing up
data. You can run it from cron to replicate data from one system to
another with great speed as only the changes are sent.

Regards,

james

- --
James Andrew Holden, Leeds, UK    (james at jamesholden dot net)
GPG Key: 1024D/8358863A    *Please encrypt mail where possible!*
Fingerprint:  32C9 A76F 3CFE A06C 1B00  5AAB 9877 4742 8358 863A
jamesholden.net ICQ: 11290827 >Buy Linux CDs from fastdiscs.com<
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.3 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQFA5nO2mHdHQoNYhjoRAkIZAJ9GTEx/blBlkCj1qGehpNtLs6HqVgCgueuS
Q4h6cQydPkw4wmMPv7LEr6c=
=NItH
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----