Hi,

I've got a 20GB Disk (from a friend who got it from another friend...etc...), the problem is, that a unknown linux is installed on it, I've insterted it as a Second Slave, so it should be hdd right? but I cannot see anything at all, how can I check if the drive has anything on it (because it was damaged, the electronic part was switched with a identical working one), how to do this? , and once I did it, and there is something how can I copy the entire drive (sorta clone) to another 20GB drive?

Sincerely
Robert B

Second slave, eh? Use cfdisk (unless you don't have cfdisk, then use fdisk) to see what (if any) partitions are on it first.

You should be able to do this with: cfdisk hdd

fdisk or fdisk -s /hdd


Anyways... see if anything shows. Otherwise, have you tried just mounting it, and going through the disk in termina/CLI?

Then to back everything up, make a folder on a drive with atleast 20gigs free space. Then just cp -r --preserve=all /mnt/hdd /home/d00d/blackmailbackup

Hi,

the problem is that linux did not detect it, I have no /dev/hdd
what can I do ?

it is showing up in bios as secondary slave


Sincerely
Robert B

Linux does not detect it? I'm not sure if the following will work then, but hell, worth a shot eh? Too bad you need the data... I'd just nuke the thing in WinXP and see if I couldn't get it working after a heavy format.

First, try "touch /reconfigure" and restart (Not sure if this works with Linux, but I know it works with Solaris... hey, they're similar. *darts eyes around*)

Have you tried fdisk -l?

(that's an L, btw)

Do you know what partitions are on the hdd? (for example, if hdd1 is linux, and hdd2 in swap, or whatever?)

Anyways, try fsck on that drive. (I belive the command is just fsck /dev/hdd)

I ask if you know what partitions are on it, because you may have to do fsck /dev/hdd#. Not sure though, havn't used fsck since I first tried Redhat. ;-_-

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Now let's face it, I'm unhelpful as hell in this topic. You might want to check around and see if there are any ghosting tools for linux that you can use in WindowsXP. (As usual, Partition Magic comes to mind... how I love that piece of software).

This is one of those times when having an IRC server we could all idle on would be helpful.