Installing Slackware COMPLETE NEWBIE HERE
 

Hi everyone. I purchased a piece of recording equipment that has a corrupt file that I need to retrieve via Linux (that's what Alesis tech support told me). They told me to install Slackware on my PC and they have a number of steps to help me recover my file.

With that said, I am attempting an installation on a Windows XP machine. I have no clue what I am doing. I was reading something about "ISO" disks and I downloaded the ISO disks from Torrent. I have 6 folders and the files are called:
slackware-11.0-install-d1.torrent (d2,d3, etc)

What do I do with those files? How do I create ISO cd's with those files? After I get the cd's created, is it as simple as booting to the first cd and letting it do it's thing?

I downloaded the complete Slackware from one of the mirrors and unzipped to the harddrive, created the bootdisk and rootdisks, but after attempting to boot to the floppy, it tells me it cannot boot. So I thought I would try the ISO route.

Are there directions somewhere that I can follow to install Slackware to my Windows XP machine? This is just a one time needed install to recover my file.

Thanks!
Brian

If you only need to use linux once, I wouldn't bother installing it to your hard drive. It'd be much easier to download a liveCD image (an iso file), burn it to a CD and then boot your computer from that. It will, to all intents and purposes, act as a fully functional operating system.

Unless the steps Alesis tech support have given you require a disk on which to install software. What are these steps?

To burn an iso file, if you have nero, choose the option to burn a CD image, navigate to the file, select it and burn it. It's worthwhile verifying the written data just to make sure it burnt correctly.

If your not comfortable with using linux. You can create a windowsXP live cd to boot from. check it out at
http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/

How do I get the ISO cd you are referring to?
Here are the steps from Alesis:
1. I lost power while recording on an HD24 before STOP was pressed.
2. I called Alesis and they directed to this HD24 group and
emailed a post about using Linux to recover lost audio.
3. I read most everything but did not comprehend much due to my lack
of experience with Linux.
4. I bought a new hard drive exactly like the one with the corrupt
information.
5. I used the HD24 to format and record blank audio onto the new drive
using the same song name, number of tracks, sample rate and enough
length to accommodate my lost recording.
6. Then I borrowed a pc with Susie Linux and it would never see all
three drives no matter what master/slave/cable select jumper settings
I tried.
7. Then I borrowed an old Emachines pc with 333mhz processor and 64mb
ram running Slackware Linux with no GUI, only command line interface.
It saw all three drives fine using cable select jumper setting.
8. I then ran the dd command using hexdump to view contents of bad
drive. The command I used was this:

dd if= /dev/hdc bs=512 count=1000 | hexdump -C | less

dd is Data dump
if is input file
/dev/hdc tells it to look at hard drive C
bs is block size
count is number of blocks
hexdump tells it to display in hexadecimal format in 16 byte lines
-C says to display any printable characters
less is to display a page at time and be able to scroll forward and
backward
9. I could not figure out where the header ended and audio began.
10. Then I did the same command on the new drive with blank audio and
determined where the header ended. Basically, when the header ended
the code became all zeros because of blank audio. I determined the
audio started at the hex address of 1dff0
11. Then I constructed the copy command as the following

dd if= /dev/hdc bs=256 count=96000000 skip=478 of= /dev/hdd seek=478

dd is Data dump
if is input file
/dev/hdc is hard drive with audio and bad header
bs is block size
count is amount of data ( I estimated 24 gigs)
skip means skip down to 478 and start copying from there
of is output file
/dev/hdd is new drive with blank audio and good header
seek tells it where to start copying from

12 Then I hit enter and saw hard drive activity light. I then left for
the night and returned the next morning to the process being finished.
13. I then did the same dd and hexdump commands saw similar info on
both drives.
14. I then put the new drive into the HD24 and the audio was there
completely.

Most of the time was spent making the computer see all drives at one
time. Once that was done then attempting to figure out the start/stop
points seemed endless until I figured out the hexdump -C command
. It
took a scientific calculator to do the hexadecimal calculations to
determine addesses for skip and seek points.

Wow. That's a pretty complex thing they've suggested. It seems to me that they're suggesting you create a new audio file full of nothing on a new hard drive/partition. Then you use dd (which is essentially a cloning program) to copy the recording you made on your HD24 to the new hard drive/partition, having first identified where the file begins. When dd's finished, you should have a file on the new hard drive/partition which has the recording you made in it, but padded by silence. If I've read that right. That seems like a lot of work to me.

This is possible using a liveCD (you might want to try Slax as you were recommended Slackware, and Slax is based on Slackware) since all the tools they use are fairly standard. However, I'd suggest you head over to the HD24 group on yahoo groups and see if anyone there has any suggestions: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/hd24/

Slax is available from: http://www.slax.org/download.php

You could also use get data back ... www.runtime.org I've always used that anytime I've had data corruption. A lot easier than using DD as well... though it's not exactly.. cheap.

Will GetDataBack work for this? I will buy it if it does! Which product do I need to purchase?

Thanks!
Brian

Not sure I am following you. Why would I boot to windowsXP live cd?

Thanks!
Brian

Where do I get the ISO file (liveCD) you are referring to?

Thanks,
Brian

If you need a bootable OS, I would recommend KNOPPIX since it's pretty straight forward. You can boot from it then it takes care of itself.

See Below:edit: I'd go with darylicious's suggestion and try Knoppix: http://iso.linuxquestions.org/distro.php?distro=5

Ok, I will try Knoppix. Thanks for your help!!

You're welcome :)

Well, I got Knoppix running and it recognizes both drives (hda and hdb). When I execute dd if=/dev/hdc bs=512 count=1000 | hexdump -C | less on both drives, the output is exactly the same. I setup a new drive on the Masterlink and created an empty audio file as the steps below suggested. I don't know Linux so perhaps I am reading the drives wrong?

Any suggestions out there??

Thanks!!
Brian

Your two hard drives are /dev/hda and /dev/hdb. The dd command you're running is using /dev/hdc as an input, which might be your CD/DVD drive (if you have one). Depending on which drive you are trying to read from (/dev/hdb?), adjust the dd command accordingly.