[Wylug-help] Disaster recovered:

[Paul Scorer]

1. Some time ago, I got to hear about this "system recovery": 

http://tinyurl.com/5ydwo

Wizard super-guru or what! FWIW I understand (i.e. have been advised)
that the details are not quite exact, but the principles are sound.


2. I can endorse use of partimage. We use it for "imaging" our student
disc contents on (dual boot) machines in a sandboxed lab. In English,
this means a complete backup. However be aware that it does not
understand LVM, but it's OK on everything else (Including RAID?, I hear
you ask. Ans: Not sure, but I think so)


PaulS


On Sun, 2007-02-25 at 16:17 +0000, Dave Fisher wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> I doubt whether anyone is particularly interested in the fact that I've
> managed a complete recovery from stupidly deleting a hard disk partition
> table.
> 
> This post is, therefore, really to give thanks to Shaun+testdisk and to
> provide some pointers for less experienced Linux users who find
> themselves in a similar situation:
> 
>   1. testdisk is a fantastic little tool for diagnosing and fixing disk
>      partion problems.  It's documentation is not perfect, but it is
>      well above average in both quality and quantity.
> 
>      My case didn't exactly fit any of the admirable worked examples, so
>      I wasted an hour or so trying to figure out why I couldn't create
>      an extended partition, or toggle any existing partition to be
>      'extended'.  
>      
>      It turns out that all I needed to do was toggle the default disk
>      geometry (changing the number of disk heads from 16 to 255) in
>      order for testdisk's analyser to correctly recognise the entire
>      disk layout.  (N.B. I never got the documented symptoms of geometry
>      problems).  Having got a correct analysis, the only thing that I
>      had to do was write testdisk's suggested partition table to disk
>      ...  brilliant!
> 
>   2. Never reboot a running system that you've just screwed-up - if you
>      still have a shell open and you have rootly powers, the screw-up
>      can often be fixed ... sometimes, even without root privileges.
> 
>      Following this rule, I didn't reboot using the new partition table
>      written by testdisk until after I had confirmed its details in
>      fdisk, parted and gpart (belt and braces, I know).
> 
>   3. If you haven't yet reached wizard (super-guru) status, the main
>      problem with Linux troubleshooting is the needle-in-a-haystack
>      search for simple solutions that you could have applied imediately,
>      if only you had known of their existence.
> 
>      Actually, I think a prince and frog kissing metaphor is more
>      accurate here, because there's never a shortage of needles in the
>      Linux haystack.
> 
>      So, until hell freezes over and quality Linux documentation is
>      instantly findable, I recommend that people ask questions on lists
>      like this, and keep asking (after properly analysing/testing
>      initial responses).
> 
> One amazing side effect of restoring my partition table was a 'dead'
> Windows XP installation suddenly springing to life.  That installation
> had 'died' months ago after I'd 'restored' it from a partimage backup,
> so I'm guessing that partimage's restoration had also been screwed by
> the disk geometry.
> 
> I mention that because its relevance to another frog-kissing exercise:
> backing up and restoring Windows installations in Linux.  I often hear
> people recommending Symantec's proprietary Ghost application.  Having
> used partimage for some time now, I'd thoroughly recommend it as a free
> and easier alternative ... especially in combination with g4l ('*host for
> Linux').
> 
> Dave
> 
>