Re: debian 2.2 setup program
<quote who="Tim Kent">
> Hi there
>
> Today I attempted an install of Debian 2.2 on an Intel box with 4 drives.
> The box had two SCSI disks and two IDE disks. When I started the
> install, I selected my root partition to be '/dev/sda1' and my swap to
> sit on the same drive also, but when the install asked me about LILO, it
> showed the hda device and appeared to have installed to that.
>
> Is it possible at all to recover the remaining files on the IDE disk? I'm
> assuming the superblock and all copies have been overwritten with mke2fs
> but the data is still sitting there somewhere. (the partition layout is
> the same as before)
the setup program will usually try to auto detect which disk is
"first" on your system in most cases with a SCSI/IDE combonation
the IDE disks take priority. If you are using PCI scsi and PCI
add-on IDE controllers you should be able to change this behavior
by re arranging the order of the controller cards, if your using
an onboard controller I don't think there is much you can do, unless
your bios specifically supports booting off another disk controller
(most of the good BIOS's do). LILO does this so it can boot, it
does not do much good to install lilo on a disk that is not
bootable. (lilo has no way of knowing if you have another bootloader
or if your bios has advanced capabilities as above)
installing LILO on a disk should cause no loss of data(though it could
and probably would wipe out another bootloader). if you had another
OS on there, no fear, the OS is still there.
this is assuming you have infact used the SCSI drive for the linux
system, and only installed LILO to the IDE disk(this is a common
practice). IF this is the case there are a few options:
boot to linux, run lilo -u, this is supposed to restore the previous
state of the system with regaurds to lilo, I have not had to use this
feature, so I don't know how well it works, in theory it should work
fine.
if this was a win9x system and you want to restore the DOS MBR then
you can boot with a DOS floppy/cd and do fdisk /mbr
or you can configure LILO itself to boot the other operating system,
most operating systems are easy to configure for, some are harder.
or, assuming the filesystem is supported, you can boot into linux,
and mount the filesystem and recover any files you want. the default
kernel i think supports ext2, fat16, fat32(vfat). if the filesystem
is NTFS, HPFS, UFS or some other filesystem it will be more difficult
to recover files this way.
the last thing i can think of, as since this is a new install of
debian, it shouldn't hurt to wipe it out, that is, try using a
repair disk/cd from the vendor that supplied the other operating system
and re-write the boot sectors, then install debian again(or make
a debian bootdisk in the installer, and boot it, then reconfigure
lilo however you like)
now if you actually formatted the IDE disk then recovery will be
more difficult. from my research over the years of accidents such
as this I've come to the conclusion to just accept the data is
gone, and smack yourself for not having a backup(if you don't
have one that is). It is sometimes possible to recover some data,
but the amount of work it takes to reconstruct files from recovered
clusters of disks and trying to determine what they are is just
such an unholy amount of work that its not worth trying for me.
nate
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