Hi everybody; Its Gene, the old f--- ahhh, man, back from 2 weeks worth of trying to make a tv station or 4 out of not very much. Hindered by the help that I was promised doing a disappearing act to goto a funeral in texas on the second day, and turning it into 2 weeks vacation. Damn, I just *love* being thrown to the wolves like that . . .
Unforch, in the process of shutting things down as I was leaving for the western slopes of colorado, I grabbed the wrong line cord and did a rather instant powerdown on this machine, something that appears to be a huge no-no for active ext3 systems. To be exact, it totally wrecked /, something I'm not a happy camper over at all. I was under the impression that ext3 was never in an invalid condition. By-by about 30 gigs of data. fsck reported many thousands of inodes as invalid. Bah! So I fdisk'ed /dev/hda, re-arranged it a bit, formatted and installed RH8.0, followed by ripping out their KDE and installing the good KDE-3.0.4, or I woudn't even be doing email as evolution doesn't seem to like pop servers at all. It cannot send to one but can suck from one. Go figure. Anyway, the advise on how to recover useing tar & gzip doesn't seem to want to work. The only way to get dd to actually write a disk file is with dd if=/dev/nst0 bs=32k of=tape.contents.# where the # is a sequence # extension in /tmp. And that only works if an 'mt tell' says its at block 64. I can probably do a pretty good recovery IF I could figure out how to keep tar from telling me its "not a tar file, skipping to the next header". The worst part is that without any indexes, or a disklist (which wouldn't be valid now anyway) I've N.D.I. whats been gzipped and what hasn't. My disklist was, shall we say, an eclectic mixture. My dumpcycle was 6 days, so the last 6 tapes should cover me ok. I'm dd'ing the tapes to the drive, and really should have enough scratchpad room to pull this off as I'd added another 60 gig drive just a month back. Ideas/hints/elevated noses/scorn/tar for dummys messages ? Proper tar syntax, etc ... will be very much appreciated. -- Cheers, Gene AMD K6-III@500mhz 320M Athlon1600XP@1400mhz 512M 99.19% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
