Re: Dead TP600X...
On Tue, 22 Jun 2004 13:47, "Brendan Dacre" <brendand@accsoft.com.au> wrote:
> I have not been able to find a way to set any cmos values and there is a
> hardware manual I have read which seems to imply it might be a motherboard
> fault. So,
Try powering the machine on with the F1 key pressed and keeping it down.
> (1) Has anyone encountered this problem? And if so can it be "software"
> fixed? If it is hardware then the laptop is going in the bin (or at least
> scavenged for parts).
One of the most valuable parts of the laptop is the screen, and it's also the
most easily damaged. It might be worth trying to find a working Thinkpad of
the same model with a broken screen.
> (2) Also, I would, one way or another, like to recover my data off the
> hard disk (about a month of e-mails which weren't backed up). So I bought
> a 2.5" disk enclosure with a usb interface. Although the computer was
> stuffed, I assumed that the hard disk would still be OK.
>
> However, I find that the partition table has been completely corrupted and
> I cannot read the reiser fs partition on the disk (from my new laptop
> running debian woody from a reiser fs partition).
Thinkpads have a variety of security options. Did you happen to use a hard
disk password?
It might be a good idea to run strings(1) on the block device and see if you
recognise anything. Something like
"strings /dev/whatever | grep ........................." should give you a
good idea of whether encryption has been used.
> Assuming that only the partition table has been corrupted (and this is
> looking more and more hopeful rather than realistic) is there a way to
> recreate it without destroying the data and leaving the file system intact?
> When you create a boot disk (from a debian woody install) at installation
> time, is it smart enough to save a copy of the partition table to this
> disk?
The first thing to do is to use dd(1) to copy the entire hard disk to another
device. If your hard disk happens to be failing then you want to get the
data before it disappears! I recommend doing this right now without any
delay. Even if your hard disk is in perfect condition you still want a
backup in case your attempts to recover data screw things up. Probably the
best thing to do is to get another disk of similar size and try and use it
for restoration.
The first partition on a disk starts at a fixed offset. You can work out the
size from looking at the ReiserFS superblock. Below is the file(1) data for
checking for ReiserFS. If you have Reiser 3.6 (most likely) then at offset
0x10000 there will be a little-endian long specifying the size of the file
system. Once you know this and the geometry of the original disk you should
be able to work out where the next partition starts and repeat the process.
0x10034 string ReIsErFs ReiserFS V3.5
0x10034 string ReIsEr2Fs ReiserFS V3.6
>0x1002c leshort x block size %d
>0x10032 leshort &2 (mounted or unclean)
>0x10000 lelong x num blocks %d
>0x10040 lelong 1 tea hash
>0x10040 lelong 2 yura hash
>0x10040 lelong 3 r5 hash
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