Re: Need help recovering Debian that won't boot.

[Kent West <westk@acu.edu>]

kenn wrote:

> maybe it's time to give up and move on, rather than further waste
> anyone's time ...
Well, sure, you _could_ do that. But you're missing out on a learning 
experience.

> but before I do, let me ask one more thing:  since the
> drive seems to be okay (I can see all the files when booting from
> Knoppix), would it be possible to move the drive to a different computer
> and read those critical files from there?
Yes.

>  Is there a howto that would help me do that?
>  
Um, don't know. But the basic process is (assuming IDE drives), put the 
drive in, making sure the master/slave jumpers are set properly, boot 
up, then make a directory on which to mount the / partition, mount it 
and copy the data. It'd go something like this:

   mkdir old_drive
   mount /dev/hdb1 old_drive
   mkdir critical_data
   cd old_drive
   cat etc/fstab
   mount [other_partitions_in_fstab] [wherever_they_need_to_be_mounted]
   cp -vr [mount_point_from_above]/my_docs/my_critical_docs/* 
../critical_data/

--
Kent