Re: [gentoo-user] Hard Drive Crash - Please Help

[Thomas Lingefelt <tomtechguy@gmail.com>]

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Grant wrote:
> Hello, I woke up this morning and turned on my laptop to find that it
> no longer boots.  It initially hung on starting hald, and once I
> prevented hald from starting it hung on gdm, and once I prevented gdm
> from starting I could log in as root but vi failed with a "Bus error".
> I booted a LiveCD, mounted /dev/hda3, and chrooted, but running
> env-update then caused all kinds of drive errors.
> 
> I'd like to save the hard drive so I don't have to buy a new one and
> build a new system on it, but if that's not possible I'd definitely
> like to save my personal data from the drive.  I'm busy/stupid enough
> to have made no backups and all of my photos etc. are on the drive.
> 
> I successfully wrote an iso of some important files after booting up
> normally (minus hald, X, and vi) so that's good.  Is there a utility I
> can run on the disk to see if there is permanent damage?  Should I try
> re-emerging packages that are having trouble or should I try to emerge
> -e world?
> 
> I suppose I should see if I can write and burn iso's of everything in
> /home/grant/ right away.  Is there a good way to get a bunch of data
> into multiple iso's that are each no larger than 650MB?  Also, I've
> read man mkisofs and experimented before with trying to preserve
> filenames perfectly but it never comes out quite right.  Can anyone
> recommend mkisofs options for preserving filenames perfectly?
> 
> Thanks for your time.
> 
> - Grant

This _may_ help... http://www.partimage.org/Main_Page but I've never
used it in this case.

I would defiantly try to put the HDD in another computer and make an
image of it with ddrescue.

Other than that I would say to make a tarball of your home dir and use
split to break it down into CD size pieces if you can.  That would take
care of the file name preservation.  Plus you could use gzip to
compress.  This is of course if you have room to work with the files.
If you could hook a removable HDD to the laptop that would be spiffy.

Checking the disk for problems?  I would use the manufactures
proprietary utilities for that.  Something you can put on a bootable CD
or floppy.

Thomas

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