Need help using KNOPPIX to rescue my PC - HP want me to RMA

[j.drake]

Thanks, please don't misunderstand, I was not at all suggesting that you should write me a step-by-step on the DVD burning thing within my time constraints, and I hope you didn't take my comment that way. What I meant was that I'll wait on DVD burning for some future time in which I'm not under pressure, and after someone else either writes a newbie guide or simplifies the UI.

I just thought there might be something obvious I was missing on the HD to HD copy issue, which appears to my inexperienced mind to be a failure to mount. To me, I can't see any reason for Knoppix to give that error. I thought about the possibility that the flaky IDE controller (if that's the problem) might be causing it, but ruled that out by virtue of the fact that hda2 is apparently mounting just fine.

Thanks,
JD

[RockMumbles]

In linux, unless a device, mountpoint, filesystem, etc. is in your /etc/fstab you have to use the full mount command, knoppix does generally have a complete fstab for the entire drive system it can see (knoppix may not be able to see drives on some controllers, ie. raid controllers and high speed ata controllers), so using:
mount /mnt/hdb8
should work if your drive is on a normal ide controller. Remember you have to mount the mountpoint not the device, so it's 'mount /mnt/hdb8' not 'mount /dev/hdb8'.

If that didn't work let's look at the mount command, it is as follows:
mount [options] device mountpoint

(as root) first do a ls on /mnt if knoppix sees all of your hard drive and partitions you should see a directory in /mnt named hdb8, if not you could either use any other empty directory in /mnt or use mkdir /mnt/hdb8 to make that directory for your mountpoint.

then to mount a partition on /dev/hdb8 that is fat32 format you would use mount like this:

mount -t vfat /dev/hdb8 /mnt/hdb8

in english this command says to mount a -t (type) vfat (fat32) filesystem that is on device /dev/hdb8 on the mountpoint /mnt/hdb8

HTH

~rock

[j.drake]

Thanks, Rock. I think this may help. I was using /dev/hdb8 instead of /mnt/hdb8. Also, when I had two large fat32 partitions (hdb8 and 9), I recall getting an error message about 9 not being in the fstab, but I didn't see that for 8. At any rate, you've given me some additional insight and understanding into a file management methodology that is still very foreign and confusing to my Windows mind.

BTW, out of curiosity, would it also work to leave the fs type ambiguous by typing :

sudo mount -a /dev/hdb8 /mnt/hdb8 ?

I ask not only out of curiosity, but because I've tried several FS types, and I'd hate to screw up by mistyping the fs type (e.g., confusing vfat, msdos, or mfsdos, or something else for a fat32, or ext2, or ext2 -j, or ext3, or e2fs, for an ext3 fs - it gets very confusing for me).

Thanks,
JD

[rickenbacherus]

Thanks, please don't misunderstand, I was not at all suggesting that you should write me a step-by-step on the DVD burning thing within my time constraints, and I hope you didn't take my comment that way. What I meant was that I'll wait on DVD burning for some future time in which I'm not under pressure, and after someone else either writes a newbie guide or simplifies the UI.

No- I didn't think you expected me to write a how-to.
AFAIK there isn't a GUI for dvd+rw-tools.

I just thought there might be something obvious I was missing on the HD to HD copy issue, which appears to my inexperienced mind to be a failure to mount. To me, I can't see any reason for Knoppix to give that error. I thought about the possibility that the flaky IDE controller (if that's the problem) might be causing it, but ruled that out by virtue of the fact that hda2 is apparently mounting just fine.

Thanks,
JD

You can use cat to copy one hdd to another like so:

cat /dev/hda > /dev/hdb

Or even just copy a single partition like so:

cat /dev/hda1 > /dev/hdb5

Of course the disk/partition you are copying to needs to be at least as large as the one you are copying from.

[j.drake]

Thanks. Nice to know the syntax for cat command. I was trying to make do with mcopy. One of the problems, though, is that I haven't used the DOS copy command since filenames were in 8.3 format, so I wasn't sure how to handle the spaces. As you know, the syntax for the DOS copy command calls for a space between the source and destination, and I wasn't sure what to do when the source location has spaces in the name, such as (in my case):

/mnt/hda1/Documents and Settings/Owner/My Documents/

In Windows, they have that weird tilde and number thing, to make it something like C:/Docume~1/Owner/My_Doc~1 , but I assume that would not be kosher for linux. But I also figured that the spaces would confuse the arguments. I tried it with underscores, but that didn't work. Also, in dos, you put in a *.* to substitute for a wildcard filename, and I've never seen that in linux either.

Sounds like, though, cat won't do it for copying from a specific directory, as you said it works for files and partitions. Sounds like what I may need to do is to wipe out all of hdb, reformat it as a single fat32 partition, and cat all of hda2 onto it. So, combining what I've learned from you and Rock, I expect I'll erase all files from the hdb partitions (if Linux will let me - may have to log in as root) Qtparted hdb into one fat 32 partition, then:

su
mkdosfs -F 32 /dev/hdb1/
mount -t vfat /dev/hdb1/ /mnt/hdb1/
mount -t vfat /dev/hda2/ /mnt/hda2/
cat /dev/hda2 > /dev/hdb1

[j.drake]

How long does cat take? It ran 3 hours before I finally went to bed last night, and was still apparently running (meaning that after I issued the command, the console returned a line feed, the cursor became a block, no command prompt was offered, no error code, and the hd r/w light on the front panel was active, and the OS was able to to other things, albeit slowly) when I awoke 8 hours later. I finally stopped it , getting a cat I/O error, and restartedbefore I left for work. I suspect it will still be "running" tonight when I return.


,
JD

[j.drake]

And, indeed, it was still "running". Cat got me nowhere.

Maybe this is a dumb question, but I've now got both hda2 (source) and hdb6 (target) mounted and in proper format, I can open them both in KDE, and I've unchecked the box in Properties to make them both writable.

Why, then, can't I simply drag and drop? I've tried, but KDE keeps telling me that I don't have permission to do this. I tried opening a console, typing su to make me root, setting a root password, and shrinking the console to try again, hoping that it would ask for my root password and let me do it, but no dice. I also tried the cp command in the console (after logging in as root), with no success.

What sort of magical spell do I need to cast to allow me to simply copy folders from one hard drive to another in KDE??? You shouldn't have to earn a degree in computer science simply to copy files and folders from one drive to another.

Thanks,
JD

[rickenbacherus]

Try launching Konqueror as root.

sudo konqueror

[j.drake]

And, indeed, it was still "running". Cat got me nowhere.

How wrong I was!! I happened to notice that a few folders had been copied, so I tried it again. After a couple more failed attempts - one time copying garbage and another time running out of room on the target disk, I tried running sudo cfdisk to get rid of the partitions that QTParted couldn't delete, and reformatted as one large 80 gig FAT32, and tried cat again. This time, I resisted the urge to abort after several hours, and let it take as long as it wanted. For anyone's future reference, it took well over 24 hours to copy less than 70 GB from one HD partition to another HD.

Thanks to Knoppix, RockMumbles, and especially the great and learned Rickenbacherus, I managed to back up all of my primary drive data, including video files too large to burn to CD, and my HP is bundled up and waiting for FedEx to give it a ride to Cupertino. More importantly, insofar as my wife blamed me and my screwing around with Linux for "breaking" the box, I could come right back at her with the fact that the only thing which saved our otherwise irreplaceable data was Linux, and how fortunate it was that I had learned enough about it prior to the failure, so that I could save our data!! I'm not sure that she bought it, but it sounded good, and she's certainly in no position to dispute it when I have a HD full of our data to show for it. Tux's honor has been defended, and I have you folks to thank for it!!

Now that I've put Linux to a practical use that I could not accomplish with Windows, I feel that I have graduated to the point of being able to call my self a Linux user (albeit a rookie user).

Thanks again,
JD

[ktheking]

A nice bootmanager is http://www.mecronome.de/xfdisk/
Maybe this help.. ?
(try this first out on anther pc with similar conditions !!!!!)