Bob George wrote: > > "Day Brown" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > [...] > > With Linux, maybe because of the more powerful os, when > > it crashes it has been impossible to remount the drive > > with another distro to recover my own work on it. > > IMPOSSIBLE? Here you go again Day, stating your own limitations as those of > Linux. There is a VAST array of recovery tools that can mount ANY sort of > Linux filesystem from a recovery disk. My favorites are tomsrtbt (floppy ) > and the amazing LNX-BBC (bootable CD). > > The problem is, of course, that you have to bother understanding what you're > trying to do and how it might be different than DOS. > > Yeah, they're not necessarily simple but not that overly difficult if you > understand how the Unix/Linux filesystem works at a basic level. And they DO > work very effectively. > > > [...] > > For all I know, there may be ways to remount a crashed > > Linux drive, > > Try asking when you don't know an answer, rather than just writing down as > fact what you think you've observed. Yes, there are MANY ways to do this, > and the Linux filesystems (ext2, etc.) dramatically INCREASE the odds of > recovering lost data intact. > > > [...] with the > > much more powerful os, there is much more complexity, > > and a Newbie, who is most likely to crash the drive in > > the first place, will be absolutely clueless. > > A newbie on DOS or any other system would be EXACTLY as lost. Disk recovery > is not something most newbies should, or would want to undertake. The > limitation isn't in the OS, it's in the user who can't/won't find answers, > even when they're readily available. Please don't try to tell me that > sitting down with a sector editor to repair directories or FATs, or scanning > large hard drives for remnants of ASCII file is trivial, particularly if the > drive's been in use for a while. Yeah, you may know it like the back of your > hand, but a newbie won't. Same applies to Linux. Spend some effort learning, > and you can suddenly work all sorts of magic. You clipped my post before the rant. I noted that anyone who really knows Linux could prolly do it. But I also pointed out that a Newbie is clueless when the instructions dont work. Of course we should read the documentation. But NONE OF THE FIVE BOOKS I HAVE ON LINUX discuss this issue. The Linux Gurus would have us all believe that Linux does not crash in the first place, so why would the distro documentation make the admission that their fine produce would ever do this by including the steps to take when it does?
Until the distro documentation admits that disastrous crashes do occur, and so far the PR is that it never does, then there will not be any of the documentation you refer to available to them where they know how to find it. I have posted on the issue on Mandrake and Linux lists about how to recover material off a crashed Linux drive with another distro, and Bob, the silence is deafening. You are the first one to say that it could be done, but I note you dont tell me what tools I need to do it with. I have run e2fsck, and when that did not work I was left without a clue. Take the example of Netscape vs Arachne. Arachne is not on a 'hidden' directory. It tells the user what the name of the Bookmark file is [hotlist.htm], and it is simple for any user to copy and/or edit that file on that or any other drive and paste it into any newer release. Why is Netscape a hidden directory? what are the names of the bookmark, addies, and pending email. It seems to be obvious that it is sysad mentality; they dont want the terminal users on a network to be messing with it. Which is fine for them, but sux for the single user home system. Which is yet another example of the problem with Linux: it is organized around multi-tasking multi-user functionality, and for the single user it adds inconvenient complexity. Hopefully someone will bring out a distro that asks up front, before anything else, if it is for a PERSONAL PC. And hopefully someone will include the macros to copy personal prefs, settings, data, and whatnot from the old to the new distro. When you did this with DOS BBS Termcomms and offline mail readers, the macros were there to do it with. Is there a macro system like this for Opera? Again, your silence on this missing functionality that dos users were used to speaks, just as it does on usenet alt.linux and mandrake, and at http://www.linuxquestions.org You charge me with being lazy, and perhaps I am, but I see, given the lack of response, that I have plenty of company. OTOH, I am not interested in making a career as a Linux guru. I would like to see Linux thrive, but if it is to do so, this elitist bullshit has got to be cut back some, and they will havta admit that crashes do happen, and suggest where to get the tools to deal with that. Is there an equivalent to NDD for Linux? Routine in dos documentation are typical samples. When I do man mount, I get the format all right, but trying to look up every single option to see if it is one that I need is a tedious pain in the ass. # mount -t msdos /dev/hdc /hdc kept not working telling me it was too many filesystems or some such. What was lacking in the example, which a dos version would have been is: # mount -t msdos /dev/hdcx /hdc note that the 'x' is a required integer referring to the partition on that drive. neither man nor info told me that, I just stumbled onto it using fdisk. So, sure the information newbies need is there Bob; the question is, is it where they can find it? This is not at all unexpected. Linux has been in the domain of the comp sci geeks and is now trying to expand into markets for ordinary users, and the documentation has a long way to go before it gets as well organized as DRDOS is. Thinking back to the early 80's the same thing was going on, where the instructions at hand no where near met the real needs of ordinary personal users. And again, it was for the same reason. The vast majority of the first PCs were sold to businesses who had computer professionals on hand to deal with the problems. My dogeared copy of DRDOS 6 User Guide is only 666 pages for an operating system that everyone will agree is not nearly as powerful and complex as any distro. Yet none of the three distro user guides I have is 400 pages, and the other books run 250 and 350. So how complete could any of them possibly be? To unsubscribe from SURVPC send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe SURVPC in the body of the message. Also, trim this footer from any quoted replies. More info can be found at; http://www.softcon.com/archives/SURVPC.html
