David Wright <[email protected]> writes: > On Tue 29 Nov 2016 at 16:10:00 (+0100), David Kastrup wrote: >> David Wright <[email protected]> writes: >> >> > On Tue 29 Nov 2016 at 09:37:21 (+0100), David Kastrup wrote: >> >> >> >> My father is living away several hours and is not technically savvy. >> >> The system boots into some sort of maintenance mode, so making a disk >> >> image via dd via phone instructions is going to be reasonably easy. He >> >> can then send the image over by matter mail. >> > >> > The one thing I _wouldn't_ want to do is boot the system at all using >> > the drive under consideration. If you've lost control of your MBR, >> > then all bets are off as to which OS is going to boot and in what >> > circumstances. You risk yet more damage to the system. >> >> It boots into some Linux maintenance shell since the boot process does >> not find its file systems for mounting. The risk basically is that the >> system in this state has parts overwritten already. > > I suppose the good news is that it would appear windows did not make > itself the only system that could boot, one of the commonly used > tricks up its sleeve. Your earlier post gave me the impression that > windows now owned the machine.
Yeah, it's funny. I am used to Windows taking over the boot but leaving the partitions in peace. This time it's the other way round. >> In short, quite a small target to hit. It's unlikely that it got >> clobbered and still starts into a state appearing functional. > > So I assume that Grub loaded a linux kernel and an initramfs into > memory but that's about it. That gives you a very limited set of tools > for recovery and no documentation. A live CD would give you a lot > more. Recovery over the phone? Honestly, I am quite more confident dictating into a command line than with a graphical environment. Even though I am frequently annoyed how DECT or whatever codec make a hash of "f" vs "s". And frankly, an initramfs contains more than the kind of stuff I have brought Linux (and UNIX since my computing history goes way back before 1991) systems up with from floppies and/or QIC tape drives. -- David Kastrup _______________________________________________ lilypond-user mailing list [email protected] https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user
