[ltp] Rescue and Recovery data destroyer

[linux-thinkpad@linux-thinkpad.org]

on Jan 25, 2006, 02:14, Vaclav Stepan wrote:

[ ... ]

> Has anybody succesfully and non-destructively used the Rescue and 
> Recovery for rescuing just one of the partitions from backup?


Kind of.

What I did (among a number of other experiments) was to restore the 
laptop's MBR and WinXP to the factory state. In this process, I kept my 
gentoo installation intact. Some preliminaries:

    Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1               1        3230    24418768+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2           12376       12921     4127760   12  Compaq diagnostics
/dev/sda3   *        3231        3235       37800   83  Linux
/dev/sda4            3236       12375    69098400    5  Extended
/dev/sda5            3236        3302      506488+  83  Linux
/dev/sda6            3303       12375    68591848+  8e  Linux LVM

sda3 is /boot, sda5 is / and sda6 is the rest.

When I restored my machine to the factory state, the idea was to restore 
the windows installation. The restauration took a while, it rolled back 
WinXP to sda1, and altered the partition table, so that sda1 spanned the 
entire drive (up intil sector 12375). When it completed, naturally, I 
could not boot into linux. However, as I had the above table handy, I used 
gentoo livecd (any other rescue CD would do) do alter the partition table 
back to the above state and resize the NTFS partition to fit the new sda1 
size. Following that, I marked sda3 as bootable (and removed this mark 
from sda1). Basically, the R&R overwrote the first N GBs only. As there 
were no linux-related data there (except for the partition table), nothing 
on the gentoo side was affected (I seriously doubt that the procedure 
would be different for any other linux distro).

Naturally, this is different from what you have tried, as this was not a 
restore from backup. I.e. WinXP came up in a virgin state, and all the 
software I had installed for WinXP had to be reinstalled.

IMHO the two crucial things to keep the dual boot installation 
functioning smoothly are:

* Leave the MBR intact (grub can be installed into sda3, and you can boot
   from grub into linux, WinXP and R&R).
* Do NOT touch the partition type for the R&R partition. Apparently a lot
   of software checks the partition type.

The grub.conf I am using now looks like this:

default 1
timeout 15
splashimage=(hd0,2)/grub/splash.xpm.gz

title=Gentoo Linux 2.6.15 (vanilla-sources) + (ibm-acpi)
root (hd0,2)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.15 acpi_sleep=s3_bios pci=noacpi libata.atapi_enabled=1

title=Gentoo Linux 2.6.15-r1 (gentoo-sources) + (ibm-acpi)
root (hd0,2)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.15-gentoo-r1 acpi_sleep=s3_bios pci=noacpi libata.atapi_enabled=1

title=Windows XP
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1

title=IBM rescue and recover
rootnoverify (hd0,1)
chainloader +1

The "Access IBM" button is also accessible during BIOS POST (and it boots 
me into a menu that lets me continue to R&R). This is one of the reasons 
not to do a lot of magic with the factory MBR.

The icing on the cake is the nice tux logo that replaced that dull "IBM 
ThinkPad" logo displayed during BIOS POST. The recipe is on thinkwiki.

Your experience has convinced me that it is time to:

* Back the crucial files for both of my installations
* Set aside some time for experimenting with recovery from backup (as
   IBM's software offers restoring to a state different from the factory
   state)

Thank you for sharing your experiences,





ivr
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