I have a machine with a nuked /etc, which I have been having a tremendous difficulty getting into. My next approach is to see if I can remove the drive from the existing computer, and put it in another one, mount the drive, and extract the data off of it.

The broken computer is a regular old grey box (GB), single IDE drive. The machine was built with RH 8.0, and was running fine until /etc was nuked.

I also have a RH 6.2 box (Dell Poweredge 2300), with 1 SCSI drive in it.
A couple of questions:
[list=1][*]How can I determine if the box with the SCSI drive in it will accept an IDE drive?[*]If it will accept the IDE drive, and I put the drive in, how do I know which cable to connect the IDE drive to?[*]Once I get it connected physically, and reboot the RH 6.2 box, how do I know which logical drive (/dev/hdDN) it will show up as?[/list=1]

Thanks in advance for any help.

Charlie Peppler

I would just give it a whirl as master or slave on the first avail. IDE channel. If no IDE channels used in the box, then master on IDE1. It will likely be /dev/hda1 . Your dmesg should tell you which.

If it doesn't mount automatically, you can manually mount it once the system comes up.

I think it should work like that.

If it is a pentium or above computer it should have a built in IDE controller. The size of the IDE drive you can attach will be limited by the BIOS of the computer.

If it is a pentium or higher computer there will be two IDE connectors. If you don't know which one is which set the jumpers of the drive to master. Make sure the red strip on the cable is nearest to pin 1 of the motherboard connecter. In the motherboard BIOS set all IDE primary / slave to auto. You will see during the boot process which channel the drive is detected on.

1st controller master - hda
1st controller slave - hdb
2nd controller master - hdc
2nd controller slave - hdd

You will have to create a directory to mount the drive and mount it manually.

Well, I had both machines apart, and went for a looksee inside.

The Dell Poweredge is a tower machine. SCSI only. Plenty of room to add more SCSI drives. There were available expansion slots, but no onboard IDE connector anywhere.

The old grey box is IDE only. Plugged right in the old motherboard, much as you would expect, so I couldn't pull the interface board over even if I wanted to (not that I relished the thought).

Good grief.

Thanks for the help and info, back to trying to recreate /etc from scratch, and be able to get the data off this machine. I am well into day 2 of this rescue mission, and I still gotta long way to go.

Happy Thanksgiving everybody.

Charlie

> Thanks for the help and info, back to trying to recreate /etc from scratch, and be able to get the data off this machine.

Of course - if the grey box has got a network adapter - it might be easier to boot off a Linux CD, mount the data partitions manually and copy the precious data over to another box via the network. That way, you don't need to waste too much time getting /etc back working. Then reinstall your system on the grey box