Steve,
I think I'd best answer your question by explaining my backup strategy for my laptops AND how I recovered a laptop that had a similar bad block issue just this past saturday. For linux I backup non-distro stuff (~user, /usr/local/ and a few select files in /etc) via rsync to file server. For the windoze partition I use partimage (www.partimage.org) to take a snapshot and shoot it up the wire to the file server. It is alot like ghost in many regards, but its cheaper, and supports jfs, ext3 and has network features like bz2 and ssl. Just recently the linux partition on my laptop started throwing errors that were uncorrectable. How I salvaged the drive was the following: 1. Booted up with a LNX-BBC (www.lnx-bbc.org) 2. Built partimage (www.partimage.org) on a compatible linux box using the --with-static-libs argument in configure and put the tarball on the LNX-BBC booted device (partimage hasnt been put into the LNX-BBC repository that I know of yet -- sounds like a nice project for somone looking to play with GAR) 3. did one last rsync of all of the stuff I ususaly back up via rsync. 4. had partimage do one last copy of the NTFS partition and shoot it up the wire to the file server. 5. ran fdisk /dev/hda and copied out partition geometry. --you need this because if the partitions do not exist on your target disk, partimage will not be able to restore them-- 6. powered down and replaced the disk with a new one. 7. booted machine with lnx-bbc and fdisk /dev/hda to built the partitions to match the geometry as shown in step 6. 8. re-grabbed the partimage binaries from server and restored the windows partition. 9. booted up windows tested windows to make sure it was happy 10. booted up with shiney new linux distro and installed. 11. rsync'ed my ~user, /usr/local/ and other stuff back to the laptop. Partimage is also pretty good at correcting errors on reading the image, perhaps were the disk or network faster I would have used it to take snapshots of the linux partitions --- On a 1.2ghz/5400RPM disk/100mbps machine partimage did 29ish Mb per minute to read, compress, write up the network, and about the same to read from the server, uncompress and write back to the blocks -- my 40GB Ext3 partitions would have taken days to deal with. hope this helps chris On Tue, 2004-01-27 at 22:26, Steve Fisher wrote: > To make a long story short, it looks like my hard drive has some corrupt > sectors and I am currently unable to boot up Linux due to some missing > files. I'm hoping the hard drive isn't on it's way to being completely > dead. I want to try to salvage any data I can that is on the hard drive > (like the e-mail I downloaded before things went wrong), as I don't > expect to get things running as they were without a reinstall. I tried > installing a program called explore2fs on my Windows partition (separate > hard drive) which is supposed to be able to read ext2 and ext3 > partitions, but the problems prevented any access. I'm thinking of > maybe finding one of those distros to where I can run Linux off of a CD > (suggestions, anyone?), try to access the drive, and get the important > hard to replace data. Any other suggestions would be appreciated. And > for those wondering, I was never able to make the time to get the CD-RW > drive working so I could backup the data for circumstances such as these. > > Thanks, > Steve > > _______________________________________________ > RLUG mailing list > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > http://www.rlug.org/mailman/listinfo/rlug
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