john hilton wrote: > My old home esmith box ( a PII 300-400--ish) won't renoot off a hard drive. > Originally came from its former life with a scsi HDD and everything was fine. > Two or three years ago I swapped this for a new 80Gb IDE drive and installed > esmith 5.0 It desn't reboot cleanly, so I left a boot floppy in the drive and > it is ok. > Last weekend I installed esmith 7.0 and on the first reboot (without the > 7.1 has been out for a month. It's best to download it since it saves having to do an extensive yum update from 7.0
> floppy) it gave the old error about not being able to boot off the boot > device (sorry not more specific, it is in use at present) THe 5.0 boot floppy > gives me kernel panic and I cant get it running to the point of configuring > and making new boot floppy. > > Currently running off the old scsi HDD, kept in the drawer for such > emergencies. > > I tried "shortening" the front end of the HDD, in case of early sector > failures.. The BIOS only lets me choose hard drive as an option. Maybe if I > go back into the bios there will be some setup for hard drives and I can > remove any reference to scsi drives. Maybe a scsi cable with an "end" on it > is recognised in some way, even without a drive attached. > Shortening the front end of a hard drive sounds like a really bad idea to me. It deletes the master boot record and probably the first partition volume boot sector. I have had extensive experience with windows and linux partitioning in the last few months. (I didn't intend to, it just happened.) I have found two CDs and two commands extremely helpful. Helix v1.8 (http://www.e-fense.com/helix/) is a computer forensics CD. The first task of the computer forensics specialist seems to be to make a copy of the target drive and Helix provides very good tools for doing this. Boot from the CD and run Adepto. It is a GUI interface around the US Department of Defence's Computer Forensics Lab's version of dd, dcfldd. Choose your source drive, choose your target drive and clone. (It's simple, but as the say in computer forensic circles, "don't fuck up".) This version of dd cloned at 30 meg per second on my machine so our 128 gig of data came down in just over two and a half hours. You can clone to and from PATA, SATA, firewire and USB2. I am gearing up to create back up drives for each of our mission critical machines and will also use this tool to transition to new hardware. Another good CD is the Ultimate Boot CD (http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/). It has lots of useful stuff but perhaps the best thing is the collection of hard drive tools. These are just the various disc manufacturers' DOS based disk analysis and correction programs but they are gathered together in one place, which is very handy. In relation to your current problem it might be possible to boot into the UBCD first and then choose to boot a particular hard drive from there. This should work if your partition tables have not been hosed. Last Saturday night my laptop hard drive started throwing drive seek errors and became quite unstable. I could have run Adepto to a USB drive but instead I ran a netcat listening daemon on my workstation and a netcat client on the laptop. An hour and half down for the 30 gig drive, replace the hard drive with a new 80 gig Samsung for $110 and do the netcat thing in reverse, reboot and I'm up and running with my dual boot XP / Ubuntu machine without hours of stuffing around redoing configurations. "Ooohhh, netcat listening daemons", I hear you cry. Sounds complicated but it's literally (http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?t=362506) as simple as:- on source machine: Code: dd if=/dev/hda bs=16065b | netcat targethost-IP 1234 on target machine: Code: netcat -l -p 1234 | dd of=/dev/hdb5 bs=16065b Run the target machine first of course. You gotta luv the open source. HTH. David
_______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
