Desperate situation

[Anne Wilson]

On Thursday 09 February 2006 21:58, Mike McCarty wrote:

>
> Congratulations! I'm so happy for you. Of course, step 2 is to change
> your backup strategy to include what was omitted.
>
It's somewhat ironic that all my thoughts have been on what's necessary for my 
file/print/mail server, partly because my backup strategy has been patchy, to 
say the least, since I started using linux.  The fact that it's so reliable 
has made me more careless than I ever was before.  However, ad hoc backups 
will have to suffice for the next week or so, until I get things settled on 
the new installations, after which a much more robust backup strategy should 
be in place.

> I love Knoppix and Kanotix. IIRC, Knoppix has a copy of K3b on it. That
> is a very nice tool for burning CDs.
>
I had taken out the second CD/DVD drive, and I rather assumed that knoppix 
would need access to the disk from time to time, so the drive would not be 
available for burning.  Am I wrong on that?  Still, pen-drives saved the day, 
and I can use this box for the burning.

> GRUB may be installed either in the MBR or in a regular BR. I have
> mine installed in a regular BR, and use the WinXP boot load manager
> to manage boot. My machine can boot either Linux or WinXP, and it
> doesn't like a changed MBR; it goes into auto-recovery mode. It's been
> years since I used LiLo. You might try the systemrescuecd
> http://www.sysresccd.org/ for rewriting LiLo to the MBR.
>
Since the data appears to be fine, with only the MBR affected, I'm going to 
put in a large new disk tonight, and copy everything across from the old 
drive.  After that, it would be useful to know if there is a good tool for 
aggressively scanning the drive to see what damage exists.  Any advice on 
that?  It will probably have to be ditched, but I'd like to test it first.

Anne