[TriLUG] screwed disk

Robert Dale robdale at gmail.com
Thu Apr 5 20:31:27 EDT 2007


That reminds me, there are some utils out there that can scan for
things that look like partitions.  gpart is one of them -
http://www.stud.uni-hannover.de/user/76201/gpart/

check out sysresccd.org.  it has a util called testdisk which does
something similar

There's hope yet!

On 4/5/07, Joseph Mack NA3T <jmack at wm7d.net> wrote:
> On Thu, 5 Apr 2007, jason at monsterjam.org wrote:
>
> > http://forums.xandros.com/viewtopic.php?p=191912
> > will tell the story sofar.. now Ive got a totally unusable computer..
>
> hosed both disks or just the xandros disk?
>
> > any suggestions?
>
> the files on the xandros disk are still there. You need to
> get a partition table onto the xandros disk. Once you've
> found the partition info, you can partition the disk with
> fdisk. You do not need to put a boot loader onto that disk -
> you can boot off a grub or lilo floppy for the moment.
>
> hmm, just noticed Alan Porter posting the same info in his
> reply, well won't go into details then
>
> To get the partition info... Did you do the default install
> with Xandros? If so, how does it partition your disk? (you
> may have to go get another disk of identical size to find
> out). If not do you have a favourite size for /, swap....?
>
> Before you mess with your disk, make a dd copy of it.
>
> Let's say you had /,swap and /usr. You know that / begins at
> 1 and /usr ends at the end.
>
> Make a guess for the end of the the / partition and only
> make that partition. Mount it (ro) - see if you can see
> anything sensible in the directory listing.
>
> Alan - what are you going to see if you partition / into
> the swap area - are you going to see junk directory
> entries? What if your partition is short?
>
> btw: always keep a copy of the partition table of every disk
> (and keep it not only on that disk)
>
> dd if=/dev/hda of=mbr.machine_name.OS_name.disk_name.date
> bs=512 count=1
>
> Once a month as a cron job at 3am (or sometime when the
> machine isn't doing anything), with the disk mounted, on
> each partition, I also do
>
> dd=/dev/zero of=zero.zero
>
> the process will terminate when the partition is full and
> the next line of the cron job should delete the file
> zero.zero If you ever need to inspect the disk, you should
> have lots of x00000000's on places that aren't files.
>
> Joe
>
> --
> Joseph Mack NA3T EME(B,D), FM05lw North Carolina
> jmack (at) wm7d (dot) net - azimuthal equidistant map
> generator at http://www.wm7d.net/azproj.shtml
> Homepage http://www.austintek.com/ It's GNU/Linux!
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>


-- 
Robert Dale



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