Huge server crash. Very old linux distro
 

Red hat 3.2 crashed at my workplace. There are backups on the server that i need access to. I am still able to putty into the system but ftp'ing out of the system causes CRC errors, i'm guessing the network is in shambles and needs to be reworked. Is there a bootable linux cd (SUSE, REDHAT, MANDRAKE) that can access the linux filesystem files on the server and also detect an external usb backup device so that i can transfer over the files? This would save us alot of heartache.

You should be able to boot any Live CD distribution of Linux to recover and backup the files. It will be somewhat slow but reliable to attach a USB hard disk to the system and mount it. You can then copy the files off of the damaged drives to the external USB hard drives. I have done this with Xubuntu Live CD to recover files from Gentoo, Red Hat, Slackware and other systems. I use Xubuntu because it does not require too much video power which is common in servers.

Ubuntu comes with all necessary tools to do what you want. Try to keep the server connected to the internet while booting off the live CD because live CD will let you install additional packages using apt-get if you needed any.

to check on available storage devices on your system type: fdisk -ul
this will show output like /dev/sda1 or /dev/hda1
hda1 represents the first IDE drive ... sda1 represents the first SCSI device ( i'm asuming that you have only one drive in the server so you might see hda1 , hda2, sda1, sda2 ....etc)
you will need to create a mount point then mount device listed from fdisk to mount point you just created. Something like:
you can create mount points anywhere you want on the file system but it is the tradition to keep mount points within /mnt directory.
If the file system is ext2 or ext3 (which will most likely will be) then the command above will mount the drive ...
also note that the USB device you intended to attach will show up as a scsi disk from fdisk output. so if you had a scsi hard drive in the server you will see two scsi devices sda1 and sda2 .....

Ubuntu is usually pretty good in mounting USB devices by itself and it should show on the desktop as soon as you attach it so after that you'll be able to use graphical interface to copy from /mnt/sda1 to USB drive.

Cheers

does ubuntu live cds allow me to transfer from a file system such as ext2 or riserfs to an NTFS external? or would i have to convert or partition on the the external usb drive?

If I were you I would concentrate on salvaging your information first. You can easily copy the information from any native Linux filesystem such as ext2, ext3, reiserfs, etc. NTFS is not a native Linux filesystem and will require that you install ntfs3g in order to create a filesystem readable and writeable by Linux. Save your data first and then think about converting it later.

I'm not up to date on Ubuntu completely but i'm sure that i supports reading NTFS ... i think the newest version of Ubuntu supports write as well but i'm not sure .. but if it doesn't , it's really easy to get it to write to ntfs
http://www.howtoforge.com/ntfs_3g_ubuntu_feisty

If ownership and permissions are important for the data you are trying to salvage,(and they likely are) then stick with a native linux format on the external usb hd. Like it has already been mentioned, rescue the data first. Worry about transferring to MS later. If it is essential to be able to read and write the usb drive from both XP/Vista and linux, then use vfat (FAT32) format on the usb drive. Both windows and linux can handle vfat. But own and perm will be lost. One workaround for this is to use tar with the right switches to preserve owns and perms, make a tarball and then store the tarball on the vfat usb drive.

what i mean about it being transferred to a NTFS drive was that the external device has already been formatted using the NTFS format. Do you think this will be an issue?

Well since you have ssh running you would always download winscp if you are using a windows desktop to transfer all the files off or you could rsync the files to another drive. No it should not be a problem with the drive being NTFS. You will just need to make sure that the server has I think ntfs3 installed. Just make sure to mount the drive with the cifs filesystem.

No the latest ubuntu 8.10 live cd has the ntfs-3g drivers loaded on it.