On Sun, 28 Jul 2002 20:40, Guillaume Cottenceau wrote: > Jason Bowman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: >> I once had to save as much of a damaged filesystem as I could. It was >> damaged from a failed drive in a hardware raid configuration that was not >> rebuilt and it was slowly corrupting the drive... I wanted to save a copy >> of what was left of a 40gig partition before trying to locally repair the >> system. I obviously did not have any local diskspace to copy it to.
IDE disks that size are around AUD$100 wholesale, probably less in some places: if you need the data that badly, buy a spare IDE drive, set it up with a minimal system, and keep it handy! >> PS: Since you were on the team that help create the rescue disk, could >> you point me to information on how you created it? > Pixel created it at first. There is not much documentation on it ;p. Yup, that sounds like Pixel: too busy being creative to do mundane things like document it... (-: >> I like this ramdisk approach so that you can remove the cd. If you have enough RAM to support it, it's not hard to do. Making the rescue disk too big to run on a minimal machine is a very bad idea. It would be an interesting experiment to practise some RAMdisk rescues on a suitably equipped machine, and monitor the page tables to see what actually gets read/written from the RAMdisk. There might be a few surprises in there which enable a significantly smaller rescue disk. The idea of a carefully compressed virtual drive to hold seldom-accessed things like kernel modules also has merit. On a fast machine (ie anything manufactured this year), a totally compressed RAMdisk might be worth the speed penalty. >> I would still want to see nc included on the base rescue cd, but >> this way I could also make and support another rescue cd for larger >> systems. (As was debated elsewhere in this thread). How about proposing a `proper' rescue disk on MandrakeForum? I'm guessing that the CookerDrakes are going to be red-eyed and frantic for most of the next month, and unwilling to put scarce resources to a last-minute proposal, however good it is. The idea would be that your proposed rescue runs from CD in case the machine is minimal, but since CDs are so large you should then (or at boot) have the option of remounting with a RAMdisk chock full of interesting utilities (like mkisofs and cdrecord) dedicated to helping you get stuff off a dying box. Depending on how trashed the existing partitions are, it would also be nifty to be able to scoop out the existing module and network config with a single command, even (maybe using transparent write-cacheing on a CD) have an option for use when the program side of the machine is trashed (drive dies? or maybe r00t3d?) but config and data are intact (ie copy most of /etc and some of /var "onto" the CD then do init 3) to get the machine limping again in minutes. Much of the work could be done using Mindi-type tricks. The perfect CD to leave in the drive, methinks. Another rooly-kool option would be a compressed CD that boots, makes data partitions and basic config on a hard drive, then starts running and slowly in background copying utilities across to the hard drive until if the machine is rebooted it comes up on the hard drive alone. `Mandrake Stealth Install,' I can see it now. (-: Especially the Windows version, the one that parses _enough_ network/IIS/user configuration out of an existing Windows partition before it starts. The perfect virus payload... or label the CD `Windows Cleaner' and hand it to a friend... (=-0) Are you man enough for the job? (-: Cheers; Leon
