minus disk usage

[Keith Roberts]

On Fri, 4 Feb 2011, Stephen Samuel wrote:

> Worst case would be to boot off of a live CD and do an 
> FSCK that way, but it could take quite a while, and there 
> is no guarantee that the filesystem will have all of the 
> parts left to be bootable after that, if FSCK removes a 
> bunch of critical files -- or the files are already 
> corrupted.

I'd recommend using another machine (friends or someone 
else's) to download and burn a copy of the Ultimate Boot CD:

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

There are *lots* of diagnostic and repair utilities on it - 
all together on one CD.

If you need to boot a Live linux, then load up Parted 
Magic from the UBCD disk(I use the failsafe VGA mode). This 
is a complete linux system that runs entirely from memory.

Parted Magic also has Gparted included with it, and a GUI 
interface for mounting file systems. If You connected a USB 
drive to your system (before running Parted Magic) you could 
mount your filesystems and the USB drive, then copy over any 
important data files from the possibly corrupt drive to the 
USB drive.

Make sure any partitions you create on the USB drive do not 
have the *same* partition name as what's on your faulty 
system. This could cause a conflict with the fsck program.

For example, if you have a partition on your system with an 
e2label called <websites>, then on the USB drive, call it 
something else, like <bk-websites> - obviously without the 
<> delimiters.

Kind Regards,

Keith Roberts

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