Darkelve Posted November 29, 2003 Report Share Posted November 29, 2003 Hi, My brother owns a Compaq Armada V300, with Win98 installad. Recently however, his windoze went into 'recovery mode', basically doing the same recovery operation over and over when booting. The partition is still accessible with a DOS boot disk, but there is nothing to write. We are talking about +100 MB of user data. The only medium big enough is 2 Medion USB Flash Disks (128MB). I just got it to work with Mandrake too! (actually, it just needed formatting, but figure that out if you're a n00b...) So I was thinking: if I can boot into Linux, then I could copy his data from his Windoze partition to the USB Flash Disk. I'm also wondering whether it is best to use an installation on hard disk (1 GB of free space on my bro's computer), or to get a CD like Knoppix (which will require another 700MB dowload...). With a Live CD, I won't have to install anything, but by installing Mandrake, I'm already familiar with it. What's your suggestion? Darkelve Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MottS Posted November 29, 2003 Report Share Posted November 29, 2003 Hi Darkelve I don't think you need to install Mandrake or to download the Knoppix cd. You can actually boot cd 1 of Mandrake, press F1 to get more options and type 'rescue' (without the quote). You'll then be left in a friendly console with all the commands available for you to use. So you have to 1) Mount the FAT partition. Something like mkdir /mnt/vfat mount -t vfat /dev/hdaX /mnt/vfat where X is the number of the fat32 partition (probably 1 if you only have 1 partition on this HD). 2) Mount the USB stick. mkdir /mnt/usb mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt/usb 3) Copy all what you want from /mnt/vfat to /mnt/usb with the 'cp' command. To copy a directory recursively use 'cp -R'. That's it! Good luck ! MOttS Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
VeeDubb Posted November 30, 2003 Report Share Posted November 30, 2003 Mott is right about the rescue console. It's the way to go. In the future however, you REALLY should download knoppix or a similar distro. Everyone should. I can't tell you how usefull it is, especialy if like me you have old hardware that crashes overy so often. If I'm in a hurry I can throw knoppix in and be on my way in 90seconds. It has all the software you need for the internet and office and most of what you'd need for repairs. Very cool. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Darkelve Posted November 30, 2003 Author Report Share Posted November 30, 2003 (edited) I tried rescue mode, but when at one step it get ats: - exiting init, giving hand to rescue It just seems to hang in there... maybe this would take a long time? System has 128MB RAM and a couple of hunder of Mhz. Could there be a problem? Maybe I should specify some laptop-specific parameters, like -noapic or st. ?? [EDIT] Out of curiosity, I also tried the install. But at a certain point, it gives a 'Kernel Panic: attempt to kill Init!' I'm wondering is this is laptop-specific. I also think I saw something like 'unable to find root system' in the error output !? [/EDIT] [EDIT2] Now when I try to install from the CD (install from floppy), it says something like: gzip: stdin error ; invalid compressed data [/EDIT2] Darkelve Edited November 30, 2003 by Darkelve Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Darkelve Posted November 30, 2003 Author Report Share Posted November 30, 2003 (edited) I tried again, this time with the 9.1 install CD's. It gave a a bit of a different message: -no init found, try to pass "init= " to the kernel. So I just type 'rescue init=3' ? Here is the error message I get with the Kernel panic: Compilation failed in ... Compilation failed in ... Compilation failed in ... ... Oops: 0002 *Some garbage I can't understand* (0) Kernel panic: VFS: unable to mount root File System on 01:03 Darkelve Edited November 30, 2003 by Darkelve Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MottS Posted November 30, 2003 Report Share Posted November 30, 2003 Hi I don't understand why it doesn't work man .. sorry. However, you could try Knoppix now. Check if your hardware is supported first though ;-) MOttS Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Darkelve Posted November 30, 2003 Author Report Share Posted November 30, 2003 Strange, in this list: http://www.mandrakeuser.org/docs/hardware/...mlf_compaq.html it shows up as 'perfectly compatible', albeit with Mdk 8.0 Do different versions of the distro support different HWare ? I would've though the best would be to keep making progress with each release (more supported HW with each new version), but maybe that's just not the case. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MottS Posted November 30, 2003 Report Share Posted November 30, 2003 Your laptop is supposed to be supported ... but sometimes new versions of the kernel stops to suport old material .. because well, it's too old. I don't think it is your case here though. Ok .. so when you boot CD1 (of whatever mandrake version .. maybe 9.2), press F1 and then type 'rescue'. You are faced to a list. Choose Go to console. That should work this way .. don't try the option Mount filesystem.... Then mount the usb stick and the fat partition. where does it stall exactly? MottS Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Darkelve Posted December 1, 2003 Author Report Share Posted December 1, 2003 It stalls directly after I type 'rescue' and confirm with '<Enter>'. Another thought I had is that maybe the disk needs defragmentation. Under Dos, I ran scandisk to check for errors, but it didn't find any. It did look a bit like a jiggsaw puzzle, however. Maybe it can't install because the HD is too fragmented?? * 9.0, 9.1 and 9.2 all gave a similar result. I got further using 'text install' one time, when the installer warned me it could not resize the windows partition. I am curious if formatting the whole disk would solve the problem, but of course I need to rescue the data first... * Suse Live Eval. CD stalls at the line 'going into tempfs'. Anyway, I'll try with Knoppix today. Maybe I will have better luck with that. Darkelve Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MottS Posted December 1, 2003 Report Share Posted December 1, 2003 It stalls directly after I type 'rescue' and confirm with '<Enter>'. Ok. When you actually press <Enter>, the kernel is loaded into the memory and executed on the machine. So you have a kernel problem on your machine. Try with CD2 .. I heard somewhere that you can boot CD2. They put a different kernel on CD2 so that may work. Another thought I had is that maybe the disk needs defragmentation. Under Dos, I ran scandisk to check for errors, but it didn't find any. It did look a bit like a jiggsaw puzzle, however. Maybe it can't install because the HD is too fragmented?? * 9.0, 9.1 and 9.2 all gave a similar result. I got further using 'text install' one time, when the installer warned me it could not resize the windows partition. I am curious if formatting the whole disk would solve the problem, but of course I need to rescue the data first... * Suse Live Eval. CD stalls at the line 'going into tempfs'. Anyway, I'll try with Knoppix today. Maybe I will have better luck with that. Then when you press <Enter> instead of F1 it boots right? ... strange Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Darkelve Posted December 1, 2003 Author Report Share Posted December 1, 2003 (edited) Yes! That appears to be the case indeed.... Still didn't get to try that knoppix CD though, need a 700MB-CDR to write it to first... I shouldn't have wasted these last 3 700MB-CDR's on Red Hat 9.0 (with all respect to you Red-Hat users, it turned out to be of not much use to me, I wonder if I can make it useful somehow, like donate it or st.). Anyway, I'll be sure to report back. Edited December 1, 2003 by Darkelve Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Darkelve Posted December 2, 2003 Author Report Share Posted December 2, 2003 Ok, so I tried with Knoppix. I tried it on my PC first to get a good feel for the distro and the tools. I got further using Knoppix then when using drake, but I still get a lot of garbage (a lot of segfaults etc...), even using failsafe. Also I get a lot of "3xx Bus error"' messages (where X is a number). Still, it *did* drop me in a root prompt and I was able to manually mount the vfat partition. But still no sign of a sda1... in 1 of my tries USB *was* detected. So my question now is: how to boot from failsafe or a similar method using ONLY detection for USB? Or a similar method. Note that a lot of applications were 'broken' when I tried them. Any suggestions? A solution seems at least closer... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Darkelve Posted December 3, 2003 Author Report Share Posted December 3, 2003 Okay, I got even a little bit more further :unsure: ... Although things were very unstable for me, with errors filling the screen, I got dropped at a command line a few times. There, sometimes things worked, sometimes they didn't and gave a segfault in that case. mounting my win partition usually wasn't much of a problem, mounting my usb stick all the more, since I had to disable almost all hardware detection when booting (I believe I enabled only swap and usb). At one point though, I got into a reasonably stable 'session'. Did an lsmod, which showed the usbcore as 'active'(?) and usb-uhci as 'unused'. Remembering what I've read on the forums (lsmod itself too), I did an "rmmod usb-uhci" and subsequent "modprobe usb-uhci'". I remember this solved things for me 1 time (actually I'm not really sure it did, I just seem to remember something like that happened). At other times, usb-uhci kept being reported as 'unused'. I was thinking about how people tried to get their ethernetcard activated, and tried "ifup sda" and "ifup sda1". Of course, that led to nothing. It did however, ring a bell in my mind (must have someone above who likes me). Maybe all was there, but just needed to be activated. So I just typed "activ + tab" to see if there was such a command. There was... I ran it without arguments first, which showed an example of how to activate a windows partition I think. Then I went to the /dev-folder and ran "activate sda"... which created a /dev/sda1 for me! Then I just followed the instructions from ... Motss, I think ... and mounted both my vfat partition and the USB stick and went copying. And it worked! Only thing: after copying about 10MB of data I got a segfault again. I'm going to retry, but I think with a little perseverance I can back it all up! It's cool to fix things! Darkelve Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MottS Posted December 5, 2003 Report Share Posted December 5, 2003 Hey .. congrat! So how does it goes with it? just wondering.. MOttS Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Darkelve Posted December 5, 2003 Author Report Share Posted December 5, 2003 (edited) Well, ironically, just worse from here on. Maybe it is the combination of options specified at boot time, but now, even with failsafe, I cannot seem to get a decent command prompt! To actually get into a command prompt, I have to cancel an ongoing process (think this was also necessary before sometimes), but instea of a 'normal' command prompt, I now get dropped into a 'bash' prompt (showing the word 'bash' before the Command Line). From here I can sometimes mount my vfat partition, but mounting my USB stick did not work again. Of course, without this last step, I'm kind of stuck ... :unsure: I get segfaults all the time and bus errors ocasionnally. Sometimes the output I described in the previous post, after which it stalls. Not what you would call 'stable'... Edited December 5, 2003 by Darkelve Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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