rescue from Live USB?

[Mikkel L. Ellertson]

David L wrote:
> My 4 year old just tripped over my laptop's power
> cord and it smashed into the hardwood floor.  :(
> The hard drive appears to have been somewhat
> damaged, but still kinda sorta works.  But
> it no longer boots to Fedora 11 successfully... it
> gets a kernel panic, presumably due to a corrupt
> or missing file.  I have a Fedora 11 live USB.  Any
> chance I can use that to recover the earlier Fedora
> installation without a re-install?
> 
Depending on how bad the drive is, you may be able to recover your
data. Recovering the installation is more problematic - it depends
on how bad the drive is. If it can map in replacement sectors for
the damaged ones, you may be all right.

> If I do have to do a re-install, I'd like to preserve
> whatever might be salvagable from my existing
> f11 partition, which is an LVM partition that is only
> about half full.  Can I use gparted to shrink that
> partition and create a new partition for a new
> installation?  I'm not too familiar with LVM and
> would prefer to use an old-school partition for
> any new installation.
>
You first have to use the LVM tools to shrink the logical volume,
and then shrink the physical volume. If you try and shrink the
partition before shrinking the volume group, you are asking for trouble!

Depending on the condiction of the rest of the laptop, you might be
better off removing the drive, putting it in an external case, and
doing your salvage on another machine. Unless you were very lucky,
and the display is still intact - then you may be able to get by
with replacing the hard drive as a temporary fix.

Mikkel
-- 

  Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons,
for thou art crunchy and taste good with Ketchup!

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