Thesis adrift on dead linux system

[Delphi]

Hello,

I am in serious sht, the linux half of my computer died today complaining of bad INODES. Ran fsck and gave default answers to all the qs it asked (y). We can only get halfway through boot now.The keyboard only understands ctrl alt del but the machine can't find the file that tells it how to reboot. It looks like it can't find any partitions.

I'm going to reinstall so I need to know if and how I can do this safely and preserve as much as possible of what was there especially the home directory stuff.

Thanks,

Keith.

[jscott]

Have you a bootdisk? You can always try to mount /dev/hda1 after booting from floppy.

[Delphi]

ok.

But what about reinstalling and preserving my old data. Let's face it I'm not the sharpest tool in the box here. Even if I did boot up from floppy and she allowed me to mount her I still wouldn't know what to do with it.

Adios Amigos.

[mdwatts]

If you reinstall, you will most likely overwrite what is there.

Boot (as suggested) from your emergency boot disk, mount the drive and attempt to copy whatever you want to backup to another partition or diskette.

[Ripley]

If the other half of your box is Windows of some description, consider downloading BeOS Personal Edition http://www.be.com/products/freebeos/

You'll need about 500Mb spare in a Windows partion to install it (from within Windows.

I suggest it because it supports a lot of file types (like heaps) and you can mount and access your linux partions from it.

It might be one way to rescue yor data.

Its about a 50Mb download.

[CMonster]

You can do a mini Linux install on another partition and mount/rescue your data that way, or transfer the drive to another Linux system and recover.

[BTBGuy]

You might want to try a program called ExplorE2FS. I found it at freshmeat.net, it reads ext2 (Linux) partitions from within Windows, allowing you to copy files over. Might not work on a drive that's messed up, but it's worth a shot!



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BTBGuy

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