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

[kenn <kenn@printussery.com>]

Kent West wrote:
> > kenn wrote:
> >
>> >> I did this, and I could see my mounted drive ... but if i tried to
ls, i
>> >> got mostly garbage, so i've probably done something ELSE wrong.
>> >>
>> >> I went back to the knoppix boot to see if I had further destroyed
>> >> anything, but fortunately, everything there still looks the same,
so at
>> >> least I don't appear to have caused any further damage ...
>> >>
>> >> I realize, of course, that I'm into way over my head ... if I
can't find
>> >> some way to copy these files soon, I'm going to have to surrender and
>> >> send it out to a data recovery company (as much as I hate to do that).
>> >>
>> >>
> > See if you've got a Linux User's Group in the area; or maybe post your
> > general location here; maybe one of us is close enough to drop in and
> > take a look-see.
> >


Well, I was determined to get out of this somehow, and I finally did.  I
learned a LOT about Knoppix as an emergency tool in the process.  I
realize that much of this is off-topic, but I'll summarize:

1.  After booting from a Knoppix cd, I could see the folders on the
dying hard drive but lacked the permissions to open them.  I never found
a way from the GUI, but by opening a console first (before using the GUI
to mount the disk), I could copy anything I wanted to after issuing a

	sudo su -

2.  I mounted the dying drive, along with a usb thumbdrive, and began to
gleefully copy files from the hard drive to the thumbdrive and move them
to my new server.
	cd /
	mkdir old_drive
	mount /dev/hda2 old_drive
	mkdir thumbdrive
	mount /dev/uba1 thumbdrive

3.  After a while, it occurred to me that scp would work just as well,
so I moved the rest of the files by that method.


I want to thank all of you, especially Kent West, for your help and
encouragement and patience on this.  It WAS a learning experience, and
I'm ever so slightly more knowledgeable than I was two days ago.

Cheers.

kennM