... And the ugly
Apr. 26th, 2005 07:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lprovenWhich is where it all goes a bit geeky.
I am trying to rescue![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sparktastic's Sony Vaio laptop, which has died. It was running WinXP and its 30GB hard disk, split into 2, is all NTFS. The trouble is, Windows has committed hara kiri as is its wont and lunched its registry.
What's worse is, the machine's internal DVD-ROM is dead. So I can't boot it off a Windows CD to attempt to fix the disk, nor off a Knoppix disk to burn the files onto her external USB2 DVD-rewriter.
What I need to find is some way to boot this thing off an external, USB2 or Firewire drive. After a lot of mucking around, I managed to make a Knoppix boot floppy on another machine. (Knoppix comes with a script to do this, but firstly the script can't write a working LILO config and secondly 2.6 kernels can't boot themselves off floppy any more. Oh, and the 2.6.11 kernel is too big, at 1½M, for a standard HD floppy anyway.) In the end I used some tips from TomsRtBt to format a 1.7MB DOS floppy, copied the kernel onto that and ran SysLinux to make it bootable. This results in... the kernel panicking and dying when it gets to the end of the boot process and can't find a working root filesystem. It doesn't seem to understand about external USB drives. [Sigh]
The highly esteemeduon provided me with a bootable USB key with RUNT (a minimal version of Slackware) on, plus a floppy disk able to load the rest of the OS off the key, but the resulting environment is a little rudimentary. Trying to explore an unknown filesystem from the Linux command line is hard enough - I confess I'm a GUI kinda guy - but I also couldn't get it to mount a remote SMB filesystem over the network, so I had nowhere to recover the data to anyway.
Any suggestions? Does anyone know any cunning tricks to boot a PC from an external USB drive when its BIOS doesn't support this? I'm beginning to fear that the path of least resistance is to disembowel the machine, remove its HD, stick it in a desktop PC and suck the files off that way. Alternatively, I need to get a replacement internal optical drive - even a plain old CD-ROM would do just fine, but I fear it's going to have to be a special Sony one to fit.
Suggestons very welcome! I've thought of trying to make a DOS boot disk with NTFS and networking, but that won't be able to see or preserve all the long file names...
EDIT: On the base, it says it's a Vaio PCG-9C1L. On the bezel of the LCD, it says PCG-NVR23. Odd.
I am trying to rescue
sparktastic's Sony Vaio laptop, which has died. It was running WinXP and its 30GB hard disk, split into 2, is all NTFS. The trouble is, Windows has committed hara kiri as is its wont and lunched its registry.What's worse is, the machine's internal DVD-ROM is dead. So I can't boot it off a Windows CD to attempt to fix the disk, nor off a Knoppix disk to burn the files onto her external USB2 DVD-rewriter.
What I need to find is some way to boot this thing off an external, USB2 or Firewire drive. After a lot of mucking around, I managed to make a Knoppix boot floppy on another machine. (Knoppix comes with a script to do this, but firstly the script can't write a working LILO config and secondly 2.6 kernels can't boot themselves off floppy any more. Oh, and the 2.6.11 kernel is too big, at 1½M, for a standard HD floppy anyway.) In the end I used some tips from TomsRtBt to format a 1.7MB DOS floppy, copied the kernel onto that and ran SysLinux to make it bootable. This results in... the kernel panicking and dying when it gets to the end of the boot process and can't find a working root filesystem. It doesn't seem to understand about external USB drives. [Sigh]
The highly esteemed
uon provided me with a bootable USB key with RUNT (a minimal version of Slackware) on, plus a floppy disk able to load the rest of the OS off the key, but the resulting environment is a little rudimentary. Trying to explore an unknown filesystem from the Linux command line is hard enough - I confess I'm a GUI kinda guy - but I also couldn't get it to mount a remote SMB filesystem over the network, so I had nowhere to recover the data to anyway.Any suggestions? Does anyone know any cunning tricks to boot a PC from an external USB drive when its BIOS doesn't support this? I'm beginning to fear that the path of least resistance is to disembowel the machine, remove its HD, stick it in a desktop PC and suck the files off that way. Alternatively, I need to get a replacement internal optical drive - even a plain old CD-ROM would do just fine, but I fear it's going to have to be a special Sony one to fit.
Suggestons very welcome! I've thought of trying to make a DOS boot disk with NTFS and networking, but that won't be able to see or preserve all the long file names...
EDIT: On the base, it says it's a Vaio PCG-9C1L. On the bezel of the LCD, it says PCG-NVR23. Odd.
