> Corupted boodsectors..., must be Murphies law...

[B@se]

Good evening all,

As this weekend seems to be a big disaster... Broke my chainwheel and sprocket, had to do a last minut job and fix my bike. Now I've managed to get the boodsectors off my dads Pc damaged, no way it will any more. Not even through some other boot options (like a boot cd nor a N ghost disk). :(
\
The trouble is that all the important data must be recovered from it before fdisk.... :evil:

Knoppix will boot normaly and I can acces the drives but I cannot copy/paste this data to my external hdd.... so my thoughts are that I could Use my suse box to connect to the Knoppix booted box and somehow get acces to the hdd and burn a copy off it. Is this possible? And as I cannot write data to an external disk would it work? Or should I open the darn laptop and jank out the hdd and put it into a bracket to get a propper readout?

I hope that you can help me out on this one. :?

[Capt. Cautious]

And a very good week to you, B@se
I recently trashed an MBR on a flash drive so I can appreciate where you're at. I do not know what system you are working with but I am assuming ( yes, I know...) that it is Winblows. What I did when our main OM machine runnig Winblow$ xpPro did a crash & Burn was thus:
1) prepare an external IDE HD of about 10% more than the data to recover. Test it and ensure it functions. Your SuSE machine should do that and make sure is has a VFAT partition so you can write to it w/o too many problem. ( you coud externally prep a drive then plug it in as an extra.
2) Boot up the Knoppix CD. I used 3.7 I believe when I did this.
3) mount the drive. After you have it mounted test and see if you can write a test file to it. If so you are good to go.
4) This is the tricky step. There may be a safer way to do this but I went to the root shell, accessed the data and did a cp to the new drive eg: cp /local/home/data /dev/hda2.
It was time consuming and I copied rather than chance loosing the original data in transit. After you have all the data on the new drive and verified you can just reload the system and after it's configured re-copy the data to the correct partition or drive designator.
I hope that this helps. There is also a dd command for copying the entire contents but I don't know how to apply it here. You might ask Foam Returns or one of the other old hands.
By My Hand - I remain
In Service,
Captain Cautious

[B@se]

Thanks for this suggestion, what I did till now. I've booted several live cd's, also a win98 dos rom. With all the knoppix roms I have rw/r rights on my external hdd wich is fat32 formatted (and I usually use for this sort off M$ Xp troubles...) but with this laptop it seems impossible to copy/paste to my external, can't even create a new text file on it. Get an problem message back " can't write XXXX file to UDA1" haven't got a clue why not.....

so I'm going to try this option again.

Thanks.