a few things

[Janina Sajka]

Crash recovery is one concern in my design. I almost had it right before, 
and do now have it right. I know, because I had occassion to use my crash 
recovery plan a few weeks ago when a resize operation went very very wrong 
and I lost /usr and /home.

In my situation I was still able to boot in rescue mode. But, were that to 
have also failed, I have my / partition in an image file on a floptical 
orb disk which I create with dd. I would simply recreate the same size 
partition and restore / from image. The rest, /usr, /home, lives in bzip'd 
tar balls.

Let me say that I have fallen in love with dd. She's my hero. Recently I 
was working on Windows installing like a fool. Well, as you well know, 
speech support on Windows isn't as robust as speakup on linux. In 
particular, the boot process and early application loading isn't 
accessible on Windows. How Windows can be considered accessible under such 
circumstances is beyond me, but that's a different email.

I found my Windows was just getting too wacky. Obviously something was 
wrong, and I sure couldn't tell what. I was booting into safe mode, or I 
was having boots die and auto restart the computer. Useless.

So, I went back into linux and mounted my orb drive. I popped in my orb 
disk with Windows 98 on it and typed dd if=/orb/win98.img of=/dev/hda3. 
Then I went and read mail for five minutes. Bingo. Windows was back to a 
known, working state and I was able to have another go at installations. I 
think 5 minutes for restoring a 1.7 gig partition is pretty darned good. 
Sure beats the commercial Ghost software from Norton.


 On Thu, 6 Sep 2001, Holmes, Steve wrote:

> Sounds like an interesting configuration indeed.  I thought a number of the
> linux directories such as /usr, bin, etc should be all in the same partition
> as utilities would be needed from there in order to complete mounting of the
> other partitions.  I am thinking more in the lines of creating a little 10
> to 20 meg linux partition to only contain stuff necessary for booting (like
> a lilo boot disk) and then have a root=/dev/hda2 or whatever and that
> partition could contain the rest - my complete root file system.  I think I
> will give this a try tonight; hey, what have I got to lose but some data I
> just recently installed:).
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Janina Sajka [mailto:janina at afb.net]
> Sent: Thursday, September 06, 2001 12:25 PM
> To: 'speakup at braille.uwo.ca'
> Subject: RE: a few things
> 
> 
> I would think that partitioning can solve this. Simply create a small 
> partition at the beginning of the disk for /. I should think 250 Mb would 
> be plenty. The rest can go elsewhere.
> 
> Here's how my IBM Thinkpad is configured:
> 
> hda1 linux 250 Mb
> hda2 linux hibernation-partition
> hda3 FAT Windows98 about 1.7 Gb
> hda5 linux /home about 8 Gb
> hda6 linux /usr about 2.7 Gb
> hda7 linux-swap about 127 Mb
> hda8 FAT 2 Gb
> hda9 FAT about 2Gb
> hda10 FAT about 2Gb
> 
>  On Thu, 6 Sep 2001, Holmes, 
> Steve 
> wrote:
> 
> > I have got a machine at home where two IDE drives are involved.  The 40
> > megger I have in there boots fine, the original 425 megger boots OK in
> there
> > when I had it installed, but the 2.5 gigger does not!  Lilo hangs after
> > putting 3 or four characters on the screen.  That's why I tried booting
> with
> > the 40 meg drive and hung the 2.5 gig on /dev/hdc; that process worked
> fine
> > til I tried using 2.4 kernel.  Now I get "interrupt lost" over and over.
> I
> > may consider repartitioning the 2.5 gig drive and see what happens there.
> > The ide.txt file suggested issues possibly with jumper settings.  I messed
> > around with jumper settings for several hours last night and came up with
> no
> > new answers at all!  The sooner I can get away from those jumpers, the
> much
> > better off I'll be <sigh>.
> > 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Buddy Brannan [mailto:davros at ycardz.com]
> > Sent: Thursday, September 06, 2001 9:25 AM
> > To: speakup at braille.uwo.ca
> > Subject: Re: a few things
> > 
> > 
> > Hi,
> > 
> > I don't think the hard disk size is the problem. Lilo has worked
> > around that issue by now, I believe.
> > 
> > However, here's a thought. At least, it happened to me once. Check
> > your motherboard's CMOS settings. If you have a virus detection in
> > your CMOS (built-in, not software like Mcafee), disable it, because it
> > thinks lilo is a boot sector virus. Confused the hell out of me!
> > Anyway, once that's done...well...that should help. BTW, lilo should
> > work fine...I know nothing about grub.
> > 
> 
> 

-- 
	
				Janina Sajka, Director
				Technology Research and Development
				Governmental Relations Group
				American Foundation for the Blind (AFB)

Email: janina at afb.net		Phone: (202) 408-8175

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