Anne Wilson wrote:
On Thursday 09 February 2006 21:10, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
On Thu, 9 Feb 2006, Anne Wilson wrote:
My main workstation is awaiting its turn to move to FC4, and was running
Mandriva. I now find that I cannot boot from the primary drive at all.
It looks as though something desperate has happened to the MBR, where
lilo lived.
Checking my data backup, I find that I have missed a whole, vitally
important, directory. I need to get that data to a safe place before
trying anything in the way of rescue.
I have got knoppix 3.2 up and can see the files. I've got a pen-drive
mounted as root, but can't copy the files onto it. Trying
cp /mnt/hde7/anne/Gnucash/ /mnt/sde gets
cp: omitting directory /mnt/hde7/anne/Gnucash/
"cp -a" ??
Eventually I realised that I could create the directory, then copy files into
it. That worked - though I'd like to know why it couldn't create the
directory from the cp command. Did it need -R?
Anyway, the files are now at least copied to a backup. It would be useful if
I could burn a CD or DVD from knoppix, in case I have missed anything else.
Congratulations! I'm so happy for you. Of course, step 2 is to change
your backup strategy to include what was omitted.
I love Knoppix and Kanotix. IIRC, Knoppix has a copy of K3b on it. That
is a very nice tool for burning CDs.
Now - I really need to get that system up and running for another couple of
days. By the weekend I should be ready to change the OS. Does anyone have
any idea how I could get lilo working again? The only thing I can think of
that I haven't tried is using a windows floppy to re-write the MBR, if it
will, then re-try Mandriva's rescue to see if it will write it again.
This does make me wonder, though, whether grub is inherently more secure by
not being in the MBR (or at least I understand that it isn't). Any comments?
GRUB may be installed either in the MBR or in a regular BR. I have
mine installed in a regular BR, and use the WinXP boot load manager
to manage boot. My machine can boot either Linux or WinXP, and it
doesn't like a changed MBR; it goes into auto-recovery mode. It's been
years since I used LiLo. You might try the systemrescuecd
http://www.sysresccd.org/ for rewriting LiLo to the MBR.
Mike
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