Lost Boot Stick, Can I Install Different Distro and Retain File Structure
 

Hello Friends,

After a recent move, I had to replace the battery on the motherboard of a fileserver on my LAN that is running Slack 14.0.

When brought back online, the machine was not locating the USB Boot Stick (Slack 14.0) (it's the second time a Slack boot stick has eventually quit working on this system for some reason, but this time I have lost my Slack 14.0 ISO Boot Disc that can also use for booting). I am sure I'll find it eventually. Also, I tried to burn a new ISO CD to boot from, but it didn't work either for some reason. In the meantime, I will try reburn it and get it to work; With both the boot stick and the CDROM not working, it could be something wrong with the PCI Bus? but the bios and boot settings APPEAR to be OK (It's an IBM eServer tower).

Anyway, I have an UBUNTU CDROM ISO here, among others; can I install it on and run UBUNTU on the file server, and still retain the existing file structure and data(the particular system is an archive/backup residing on my LAN)? I would think so, since Linux is Linux. I tried to just boot to the UBUNTO Cdrom without installing it, but couldn't figure out how to mount the hard drives from there. I suppose that would also solve my problem.

Thanks,
Zarb

first do a "fdisk -l " to find the parttions
then a mount /dev/sd?? /somedir
REALY DUDE !
you should have installed your O/S to a hard drive

Why on earth were you trying to run a file server from a USB flash drive?

99.9999% chance you burned it out. USB flash drives are not meant for the continuous writes you get with an OS, most will kick the bucket within a couple of months under that kind of load.

Next time, install it to a real drive.

Thanks everyone. Basically I have been booting with the bootstick because it was easy, and I had previously had trouble booting from the hard drive when I set up the system, HOWEVER THERE IS A BOOTABLE SLACKWARE PARTITION ON THE DRIVE; I put it there, and it's still there I just saw it earlier using cfdisk.

So I suppose this thread has become focused on how I can save my archives on the hard drive while I (re)install an operating system, or, 2) how do I boot to that bootable partition that's already on the drive? Because without bootstick or CDROM, the machine's boot agent says "1962 Drive does not contain a valid boot sector" and "Operating System not found".

What parameters should I enter?

Also, I was finally able to get the slackware 14.1 CDROM disc one, to come up with a boot prompt on the machine, but the default does not boot the linux partition on the hard disc of course, and I forgot what to do to mount the hard drive when booting from a CDROM ISO.

~Zarb Jones Granola

Wait, so the USB drive just contains the boot loader? Not the OS itself?

That's a little odd, but much less of an issue than what I was referring to earlier. I was under the impression the entire OS was loaded onto and running off of the USB stick, and the machine's hard drive just contained data. In that situation, the OS will chew through the USB drive's write cycles in no time, with all of its timestamp updating, event logging, etc.

If I understand you now, the entire OS is loaded on the hard drive, except for the boot loader, which is on the USB stick. Unfortunately I'm not familiar enough with boot loaders to know how, but it shouldn't be that big of an issue to get the system to boot to the installed OS. I suggest that once you're in, you install a boot loader to the hard drive.

The only way I know how (this is almost certainly not the most efficient way), is to install a "user friendly" OS onto the USB drive (pretty much anything but Slack). During the bootloader configuration it will search the local hard disk for installed OSs, locate your current Slack install, and add it to the boot list. Then when you boot the USB drive, you'll have an option to boot the OS you just installed on the USB, or the existing Slack install on the HDD.

aye aye aye,

The slack 14.1 install process offers to make a bootstick whenever a full install is performed, that's how I came to have it. But, the bootstick I am giving up on for now, since they don't any longer work on this machine, for whatever reason.

But yes, you read me right, the OS is there on the hard drive.

Isn't there some way for me to just mount the hard drive after getting a boot prompt from the ISO on the CDROM drive? This same impasse is why I was still using the USB bootstick all this time; I never got it figured out how to properly mount the filesystem without it.

Today, I tried "mount root=/dev/sda2 /mnt" from the ISO boot prompt and it didn't work (I think that's close, but probably not exactly the right input). From the bootstick prompt, I used to give it "huge.s root=/dev/sda2 nomodeset" and that brought me to my password prompt.

I don't know what the xxx I'm doing wrong now, but I am worried about making sure I have access the files on the drive, it has lots of stuff on it that I regularly need for personal and business purposes.

If this problem is not resolved, I am going to HAVE to do an OS reinstall, and then I am going to be interested in how to do it without losing data.

zarB

I am absolutely positive there is, but I don't know it, since I don't know bootloaders that well. Hopefully somebody else can chime in with more info.

I believe that's jumping the gun a bit. As I mentioned before, a regular OS install on the USB will search the system drives for other OSs and add them to the boot list, at which point you can use that USB to boot to its own OS or the Slack OS on your HDD. While it's a bit of a roundabout (and entirely inefficient) way to accomplish your goal, I'm fairly confident it will work. Any mainstream distro should work. Ubuntu, Mint, OpenSUSE, Fedora...hell I just installed CentOS on a USB and I couldn't STOP it from adding the rest of the OSs on my machine to its boot list.

Indeed, I was able to mount the hard disc using the ISO CD, and I can see my files, so it looks like everything is going to be OK.

However, Now the challenge at hand is that, for example, I cannot run lynx, or startx, or shutdown -hP now. And whatever the answer to this challenge turns out to be is possibly also the answer as to why I cannot shell in from other terminals on the network (which I need to do in order for the machine to perform its designated function as backup/fileserver on my LAN).

Last night, when mounted to /mnt, the shell returned commentary such as "must perform this process from PID 1".

This morning, when mounted to /root, the answer is "command not found"

I expect that the answer is to be found in my working from the proper pathway protocol context on the system that allows my shell to access all the commands which I am accustomed to using (?).

Now I can't unmount /dev/sda2 because "umount: /root: device is busy."

Also, I have not yet been asked for my root password, the protocol for which should still be in place.

ZARB

It doesn't sound like you booted to the OS installed on your drive. It sounds like you booted to a live OS, and then tried to mount your drives where they're "supposed" to go, which obviously will cause problems since it will interfere with the running OS when you try to replace directories like /root.

If your #1 priority is to get access to your data, my suggestion would be to get knoppix live image, and boot with it. It has a very robust set of tools to use 'out of box', and should in all likelihood find all your partitions on the HD automatically. It should not be difficult to get ssh and scp access to it either. I don't think it has samba server preinstalled, but it seems to have the ability to mount windows shares - so if you make a share on another computer on the net, you should be able to 'push' files into it.

I would refrain from installing anything new on the disk until you either have full condifence on exactly what andhow you do - or you have full backup of all important data from the disk. Installing anything with out-of-box distributions has the possibility of - in worst case - accidentally repartitioning your drive to use with the new system.. wiping all the data that used to be there.

Generally speaking you can install either a new system, or just a new bootloader and kernel image - and set it up to access your old data. You'll need to either have full knowledge of your old system's partition scheme, or be able to obtain it prior to installing - again so that you won't accidentally destroy something you shouldn't have. You shouldn't set up any new partitions, or empty/format any existing ones unless you are absolutely certain of what you are doing.

The reason why your boot loader from hard drive doesn't work, could be something as simple as having the USB drive normally recognized as first drive, and the hard drive as second one - and then in absence of USB stick that was normally there, the hard drive's order might change.. or maybe your bootloader was always installed on USB stick, and just the boot partition was on the HD. It's really difficult to say anything certain without knowing the full configuration of the system.

I'd say start with knoppix (or some other live image linux), go to command prompt and start with doing

and then

and

And show the printout of those commands. Those will show the currently mounted filesystem, and the disk devices created on the device directory. It'll give some basic info at least, on what you have on your system.

After that we can continue with creating mountpoints on the live image's system, and mounting all your old partitions there on READ ONLY mode, and have a look at what is where - that should then give a fairly good idea of how your system is built. Putting it together from there would hopefully be possible.

Nogitsune,

I was actually previously able to boot disc one of slack 14.0 ISO cdrom, and was able to see my files on the drive after mounting the HD to /mnt directory. I just cannot access them with my WINscp tool (installed on Windows terminals on the local network) or other ssh on the LAN, and I cannot run any GUI on the fileserver terminal itself to do any manipulation of files either. But I never was asked to enter my password, and I suppose this is because I have read-only access through the live OS.

I fully understand the perils of any reformatting attempt, and if this doesn't work Knoppix would be the path forward to save data. But I suspect that during the Slackware ISO boot prompt, there is a way to mount the HD properly and boot the kernel on the drive (I seem to recall doing it before), and that would settle the issue.

Anyway, I will get in there and run the ls parameters you suggest, A.S.A.P., but it might be a day or three. I have not needed any of the files on the archive yet, but it is bound to happen sooner or later, as it is a working archive for my home office.

Thank you for your help on this.

Z