[ale] My contribution to Cool tips

[Matt Shade]

Though this may sound like a no-brainer to some of you, I just saved my
butt with two cool things I discovered just by playing around after a
superblock problem.

I have another 386 PC that runs Linux and I keep a LOT of files on it. I
have a 1.2 gig drive partitioned as /dev/hda1-4, assigned as /, /usr,
swap, and msdos. Well, upon a reboot yesterday, hda1 panic'd, and I
couldn't ever boot up from it. I'd try booting from a root floppy, but
still couldn't mount it because of a corrupted superblock. What's more,
I couldn't fsck it because of the minimal system I was on due to booting
from the floppy.

First cool thing: I loaded Linux on my parallel zip drive. I had to use
a boot floppy, then
 mount root=/dev/sda4
Of course, this is a SLOW system, but hey, I have a complete working
Linux system now. One thing about installing it - I couldn't use setup
because it doesn't see the zip drive. I had to use pkgtool and install
each a? directory (from my premounted msdos partition).

Then I tried fsck. Wouldn't work because of the bad superblock. I pored
over manuals and found -
Second cool thing: the -b nn switch. This allows you to run fsck on a
filesystem using the alternate superblock. Hell, I didn't even know I
had an alternate superblock. Guess I just read right over that part.
Anyway, it managed to fix hda1 so I was able to not only mount it, but I
can boot off it too.

I assume this means I may have HD problems, so I'm in the process of
backing up (only 2 kinds of data: data you have, and data you haven't
lost).

I'm also copying over all essential files and directories to the zip
disk so in the event of another failure, I can totally reproduce my
system simply by booting from the zip drive.

Hope this sparks an idea or two in someone else. It saved me from having
to recreate a lot of needed files.

Matt Shade