Desperate situation

[Mike McCarty]

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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