james holden

The hard disk in my laptop failed again yesterday :-( Fortunately it’s still under warranty, so I’ll have to dig out the receipt and go and swap it.

The good news is that I was mostly able to recover my data. Here’s how:

• Boot Knoppix in failsafe mode. Flip back to a text console using Ctrl+Alt+F1.
• Get the networking running. You’ll need to run /etc/init.d/pcmcia
• Set up an NFS server on another box. You’ll need to add a line containing /somewhere/with/lots/of/space *(rw,sync) to /etc/exports and then run exportfs -a
• Mount the NFS share from the poorly computer using mkdir /tmp/mnt ; mount -t nfs server.ip:/somewhere/with/lots/of/space
• Examine the partition table using fdisk -l /dev/hda to find your home partition.
• Image it with this command: dd if=/dev/hdaX of=/tmp/mnt/home.img conv=noerror,sync. This might take some time to run, depending on how broken the disk is. You’ll end up with a large file on the NFS server which you can mount as a loopback device.