Re: [Blind-sysadmins] troubleshooting and linux live CD repair andrecovery

Hello Everyone, First of all my thanks to everyone who offered suggestions on this issue. I do not have a separate box here to put the drive in nor do I have my USB drive converter I have both of these items 200 miles away, taking the box back with me was/probably still is an option. I downloaded spinwrite and grml. I did not however get to use any, this gets weird and in all my time working with computers I've not seen this one. Here goes. First of all the box will not boot from CD, probably bios. I started it with no media in the drive and got that black screen with the cursor thingy in the top left corner. Five minutes later, and I did this again and timed it, it booted in to xp. I have no idea why this is happening. I'm going to run memtest on this box ram bank by ram bank, my first question though any ideas as to why this delay, it sounds to me something hardware, like the system is trying to talk to something that is either failing, has failed, or isn't responding. In windows i checked device manager, all looks good no failed devices and the like. This is an xp home box, i'd like to back it up, i've got an external terrabyte drive, does anyone know a free accessible backup option? I'm also looking for a hardware raid card recommendation, i'm going to provide another hard disk of equivalent size i want to set up raid 1 mirroring. Thanks. Dave. On 12/2/10, John G. Heim wrote:

I usually use grml but I've heard good things about vinux. I have tried vinus and it worked fine. But it comes up in a GUI and I prefer CLI.

grml: http://www.grml.org/ vinux: http://vinux.org.uk/

---- Original Message ----- From: "David Mehler" To: "blind-sysadmins" Sent: Thursday, December 02, 2010 8:47 AM Subject: [Blind-sysadmins] troubleshooting and linux live CD repair andrecovery

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Hello Everyone,

I've got a problem and there's some urgency with it. I've got a pc, it's an older dell p4 2.4 ghz I think running xp home. It's no longer booting. It was working fine yesterday afternoon and was powered down. On next power up last night there were no errors on the screen, but the box didn't boot the only thing was a cursor thingy at the top left of the screen.

I checked cables, they're all in tight, checked the primary drive I am 50 50 on whether it's getting power it feels like it might be, but i'm not 100% certain. I unplugged it's drive cable and restarted the box it complained immediately that the primary master had been removed. I plugged it back in and said error went away, but no other errors came up indicating that the system detected another issue with the drive.

Two reasons i'm very worried about this drive are: 1 I don't think it's been backed up and there's files that are only on this drive, and 2 I don't have another internal hard disk to use with the box.

I do have an external ntfs formatted terrabyte drive USB that I can use. Last time I looked there were not any speech accessible windows live CD options that were out there, has this changed? If not, a Linux option would be welcome. I need to get speech then find out if the drive is responding and possibly repair it, a suggestion was made that the mbr could have got corrupted, I do not see how but I don't have any other ideas.

Any suggestions appreciated. Thanks. Dave.

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