User:Skierpage/Recovery

Disaster!

I followed instructions to create a bootable SD card,

 zcat blah.bootable.gz > /dev/sdX

This is dangerous because it overwrites the partition, but I had done it before, I knew there was nothing on my SD card and /dev/sda is my SD card.

But /dev/sda is my hard drive. The whole thing.

I checked with df and the size looked wrong, then I read my notes (should have done that first) and I was overwriting the wrong disk. Ctrl-C!

Then I tested the .gz file and it was corrupt, so I thought nothing had been written. My computer worked fine.

The next day I got an error coming out of standby about not reading C:\$MFT or something. So I decided to reboot. Big mistake, I should have read partition tables, backed up some key files, and prepared for disaster.

Rule 1: do what you can while it's working.

Errors shutting down, then could not reboot, bad disk.

Failed recovery

I couldn't find my Windows XP CD-ROM, even though Falcon Northwest make a big deal. Of course my Windows XP is so dramatically different thanks to all the updates and service packs that the original disk has been useless for System File Checking and file recovery and such. I had always meant to follow instructions to slipstream a new boot CD-ROM, where you make a fresh Windows CD-ROM that contains the latest files, but never did.

Rule 2 You need a boot disk around.

Falcon Northwest provided me a personalized Recovery Disk, I inserted this and nothing happened. Zero feedback.

Into Kubuntu Live CD

I had built a Kubuntu Live CD. That booted fine.

The Kubuntu Live CD startup menu has "check disk" menu choice is useless, it just checks the CD-ROM. BUG: it is badly named.

So I ran the Live CD environment, and that worked fine. I'm updating this web page from the Live CD. Hooray for free software that is happy for the world to make bootable CDs.

Create a recovery disk/USB?

There are lots of dedicated "recovery CD" distributions. Distrowatch lists dozens, and the search leaves out the GParted distribution.

The problem is, I'm running from my only CD drive, so I can't burn another CD. Besides, I don't want to. I have gigabytes of space on my USB flash drive and SD memory card.

BUG: All the distributions I checked have crap guides to creating a bootable USB. Some even talk about making a floppy. The functionality and documentation for making a bootable USB needs to be separated from all these distributions.

Use what I have

But I'm already running Linux. Kubuntu has the parted partition editor and the NTFS tools.

BUG: all the online web recovery instructions are crap. They tell you how to make a recovery CD or floppy or whatever, tell you to stick it in the machine and reboot, but fail to tell you what to do next. I guess they assume you'll walk through their beautiful menu system. It is stupid and short-sighted not to mirror help and guidelines on a web site. You should never have to create physical media and boot from it just to read documentation.

The first four pages of Google results for "linux partition recovery tutorial" are either sites trying to sell me something or yet another guide to creating a recovery CD. I gave up finding any explanation of what to do.

Find your hard drive

You have to find the UNIX device name /devyour disk

In a Linux console, enter

 dmesg | grep disk
 dmesg | grep drive

one of those should identify promising disk devices.