SystemRescueCD
SystemRescueCd is a linux system on a bootable cdrom for repairing your
system and your data after a crash. It also aims to provide an easy way
to carry out admin tasks on your computer, such as creating and editing
the partitions of the hard disk.
It contains a lot of system utilities (parted, partimage, fstools, ...) and basic ones (editors, midnight commander, network
tools). It aims to be very easy to use: just boot from the cdrom, and you
can do everything. The kernel of the system supports most important file
systems (ext2/ext3, reiserfs, xfs, jfs, vfat, ntfs, iso9660), and network
ones (samba and nfs).
-
U Parted creates, resizes, moves, copies partitions, and
filesystems (and more).
-
GParted GUI implementation using the GNU Parted library.
-
Partimage saves / restores partitions to an image file on
another partition or to another system.
- File systems tools (e2fsprogs, reiserfsprogs, reiser4progs,
xfsprogs, jfsutils, ntfsprogs, dosfstools): format, resize, and debug
an existing partition of a hard disk
- Ntfs3g: enables read/write access to MS Windows NTFS partitions.
-
sfdisk
saves / restores partition table (and more).
-
Test-disk tool to check and undelete partition, supports
reiserfs, ntfs, fat32, ext2/3 and many others
- Network tools (Samba, NFS, ping, nslookup, ...)
SystemRescueCD is based
on Gentoo and contains a stripped-down set of applications for system rescues.
Needs Linux knowledge to operate. So it doesn't include OpenOffice or the
Gimp or all of the other productivity applications that Knoppix has. You
can get ISOs for x86, Sparc, and PowerPC. The
x86 version is a mere 155 MB. Gui typically does not work (Xorg is
installed).
Even better: You can boot and run SystemRescue from a USB stick. Newer
systems support booting from USB devices; usually you need to go into the
system BIOS to turn this on. It's not completely reliable, however; some
systems seem to be allergic to booting from USB devices, so be sure to test
it before you need it.
With SystemRescue you can copy files over the network, do serious network
troubleshooting, read and write all the major filesystems including NTFS,
manage partitions and filesystems, and do secure deletions. SystemRescue
comes with my favorite data recovery tool, GNU ddrescue. This is
the best utility for grabbing data off a failing hard drive. It is fast
for a dd-based command, and smart enough to skip over bad blocks
and keep going, looking for good blocks to copy.
The most surefire method I know requires a second local hard drive of
equal or greater size; either SATA/PATA or USB. Then boot up SystemRescue
and copy the first drive to the second drive. Of course you must replace
the drive names in the example with your own drive names:
# ddrescue /dev/sda /dev/sdb
You may copy partitions instead of whole drives. Then run fsck
on the second drive to check for and fix errors. Make sure it is not mounted,
then run this command:
# fsck /dev/sdb
Add the -a option to tell fsck to automatically fix all
errors. Use fsck only on Linux filesystems. For other filesystems
you'll need their own native filesystem-consistency-fixing utilities.
Don't confuse GNU ddrescue with dd-rescue. They do the
same thing and both do it well, but I think ddrescue is faster and
more reliable.
GParted is the best partitioning and filesystem-creation application
there is. Put it on a bootable medium and you can manage most Linux, Unix,
Mac OS X, or Windows partitions and filesystems. Add the dd-based
Clonezilla for cloning, and you have the ultimate power tool for new installations,
restores, and replications. Clonezilla is an intelligent partition or disk-cloning
program that works on any filesystem, because it operates at the block level.
On supported filesystems (which are pretty much the same batch as GParted)
it copies only used sectors. On unsupported filesystems it can't tell which
ones are used, so it does a block-by-block copy. Either way you get your
clones.
Download the torrent from
TuxDistro. (The
other download sites don't seem to exist.) Visit
GParted LiveCD for
instructions on creating a bootable USB stick. This uses the same download.
Our Excellent Ancestors: Tomsrtbt and SuperRescueCD
Tomsrtbt, "the most GNU/Linux on
one floppy disk" was the first bootable live Linux on removable media. After
all these years it is still useful. True, most computers these days don't
even bother with a floppy drive, but for machines that still have them it's
a great rescue diskette. It needs only 8 megabytes of RAM. It comes with
everything you need for networking and copying files over the network, which
is probably the #1 job for a rescue device. It has filesystem utilities,
including Windows filesystems, and basic networking troubleshooting commands,
so you can perform a surprising number of tasks from this tiny ancestor
of bootable live Linuxes. Tomsrtbt has saved the day for me more times than
I can remember.
H. Peter Anvin's
SuperRescue CD was the first live Linux CD. Mr. Anvin is a bootloader
guru, as well as a
significant inventor or contributor in a number of projects. Super Rescue
CD is based on Red Hat 7.2, so it's of limited usefulness on modern systems.
But it's a nice tool for older systems; it only needs 24 megabytes of RAM
and it handles older hardware without hassles. If you want X Windows, just
type startx at the prompt and you get KDE. It's a funny-looking older
KDE, but still the real deal.
SuperRescue CD pioneered on-the-fly compression/decompression, which
is how you stuff 1.7 gigabytes of operating system and applications onto
a single CD.
Results 1 to 7 of 7
-
January 14th, 2011
#1
- Join Date
- Mar 2008
- Beans
- 16
Partimage and ext4
I've been using PING (which I understand uses Partimage under the covers)
for a little while to back up an ext4 partition. I've just become aware
that Partimage doesn't support ext4, so I'm confused as to why it appears
to be working (although I've not tried to restore it).
The Disk Utility (version 2.30.1) on Ubuntu 10.10 reports the partition
as Ext4 (version 1.0). However, PING and GParted report it as ext3fs,
which may explain why Partimage is processing it. As far as I'm concerned
it should be ext4 as that's what I selected during installation.
What's going on?
Adv Reply
-
January 14th, 2011
#2
- Join Date
- Nov 2005
- Location
- Carmel, Indiana U.S.A.
- Beans
- Hidden!
- Distro
- Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron
Re: Partimage and ext4
The last time I checked the Partimage website, it was plainly stated that
Partimage does not support ext4 or NTFS. As I recall, there is no plans
to move to this support.
I have been using fsarchiver quite successfully for about 9 months. I
supports most common file system types (including ntfs and ext4). Even
though it is still classified as "in development" I have found it both
stable and reliable. I have restored numerous ext4 and ntfs partitions
with no lingering issues.
If you're interested, I've authored a small "white paper" on the subject.
See the Backup Strategy Ver 2 link in my sig. Also not the comment
attached to the paper for an important update.
Hope this helps.
IndyTim / DataMan
New Build : Core 2 Quad, 8G RAM, 1.75TB Storage ... it's fun!
GRUB
Partition
Linux Backups- Ver2
Easy
LAMP Install
Linux ID 422356 Ubuntu User 15015
When a hard drive, CD/DVD, USB
stick, or any digital storage media
is on its way to the Great Bitbucket
in the Sky, GNU ddrescue
is my favorite data recovery tool.
GNU ddrescue is
included in the default SystemRescue
image. Before we dive into the fun
stuff, there is some vexing naming
confusion to clear up. There are two
ddrescue programs in
SystemRescue. GNU ddrescue,
by Antonio Diaz, is the one I
prefer. The version on the current
SystemRescue release is
ddrescue 1.14. There is also
a dd_rescue, version
1.23, by Kurt Garloff.
dd_rescue is nice, but it's
slower than ddrescue
and doesn't include as many
features.
Just to keep it interesting,
Debian Linux adds its own bizarre
naming conventions. The Debian
package name for GNU ddrescue
is gddrescue, and the package name
for dd_rescue is
ddrescue. But the binary for
gddrescue is /sbin/ddrescue, and the
binary for dd_rescue is
/bin/dd_rescue.
Fortunately, SystemRescue doesn't
mess with the original binary names,
and calls them /usr/bin/ddrescue
and /bin/dd_rescue.
Enough of that; let's talk about
what makes GNU ddrescue
my favorite. It performs block-level
copies of the failing media, and so
it doesn't matter what filesystem is
on the media. You're probably
thinking it sounds like the
venerable dd command,
and it is similar, with some
significant improvements. dd
works fine on healthy disks, but
when it encounters a read error it
stops, and you have to manually
restart it. It reads the media
sequentially, which is very slow,
and if there are a lot of bad blocks
it may never complete a full pass.
GNU ddrescue is
fully automatic and fast for a
block-level copy program, and you
want speed when a drive full of
important data is dying. It seeks
out good blocks to copy and skips
over the bad blocks. It optionally
records all activity in a logfile,
so you can resume where you left off
if the copying is interrupted for
any reason. It is best to always
generate a logfile, because every
time you power up the failing drive
the more likely it is to die
completely. Using a logfile ensures
that ddrescue will not
repeat operations, but will move on
and look for new good blocks to
copy.
When you are rescuing a failing
drive, the first step is to copy it
with ddrescue. Then
take the original offline, and
perform any additional recovery
operations on the copy. Don't touch
the original any more than you have
to. You can copy the copy as many
times as you need for insurance.
You need a healthy drive to copy
your rescued data to. I prefer
USB-attached media such as a USB
hard drive, USB thumb drive, Compact
Flash, or SD cards. Of course a
second internal hard drive is a good
option, or this might be your chance
to finally use that eSATA port that
always looked like it should be cool
and useful, but you never found a
reason to use it. Your second drive
should be at least 50% larger than
the drive you're recovering. The
troubled drive must not be mounted.
The simplest invocation looks like
this:
# ddrescue /dev/sda1
/dev/sdb1 logfile
Here, /dev/sda1 is a
partition on the failing drive.
Everything on /dev/sdb1 will be
overwritten, and the logfile will be
written to /dev/sdb1. You can name
the logfile anything you want. You
can rescue an entire drive if you
prefer, like this:
# ddrescue /dev/sda /dev/sdb
logfile
Note that if there is more than
one partition on the failing drive
and the partition table is damaged,
you will have to re-create it on the
rescue drive. I copy one partition
at a time to avoid this sort of
drama.
You can have ddrescue
make multiple passes with the
-r option; sometimes you can
make a more complete recovery this
way. You can go as high as you want;
I use 3-5:
# ddrescue -r5 /dev/sda2
/dev/sdb1 logfile
Sometimes ddrescue
is nearly magical for rescuing
scratched CDs and DVDs. The first
command copies the disk, and the
second command copies it to a blank
disk:
# ddrescue -n -b2048 /media/cdrom image logfile
# ddrescue -d -b2048 /media/cdrom image logfile
You can give the image file
whatever name you like. While I've
never needed to go beyond the basics
in this article, ddrescue
has a whole lot of other
capabilities that you can learn
about in the
GNU ddrescue manual.
,,,SystemRescueCd is based on Gentoo and, now, with this version, you can
add the packages of your choice using Gentoo's package manager. This is present
here by including development tools (like gcc, automake, autoconf, etc.) and
specific Gentoo-Linux applications (such as emerge, autoconf, etc.) required
in order to install new packages, as all that is installed on Gentoo must be
compiled.
SystemRescueCd includes 4 kernels, 2 standard ones (rescuecd and rescue 64)
and 2 alternative ones (altker32 and altker64). Now, you have the possibility
to compile which kernel you want, to best fit your needs. This is usually performed
if you'd like more recent sources or you need another driver, or you simply
need various compilation options.
Another clever utility we find in this version is
the backstore, primarily used to keep the changes after a reboot.
A backing-store is a loopback filesystem containing all the changed files
of a system. Every minor file change like a file edit, creation or deletion,
is recorded on the backing-store, so you just have
to load the appropriate one to return to the state you want.
Now, let's have a look at a list with some of the highlights of SystemRescueCd
1.1.0:
· The two kernel sources, standard and alternative, have been swapped;
· The majority of drivers are compiled as module in the standard kernels (2.6.25.16);
· The majority of drivers are built-in the alternative kernels (2.6.25.14);
· The necessary development tools (gcc, make, ...) and Gentoo tools (emerge,
equery, ...) have been added;
· The nameif option has been added, which can be used to specify the name of
each ethernet interface using the mac address (ex: "nameif=eth0!00:0C:29:57:D0:6E,eth1
00:0C:29:57:D0:64");
· Support for backing-store loopback
file systems has been introduced;
· Added support for the speakup (support devices for blind people).
You can find more information regarding the new features and updates by visiting
the official
changelog.
New features introduced in SystemRescueCd-1.1.0
Features introduced in SystemRescueCd-1.0.x
Hello.
Firstly, thank you for your efforts in creating such a useful collection
in a package that works so well. I love it and think it's a great system rescue
tool.
Will you please consider including the Linux Disk Editor (http://lde.sourceforge.net/)
in the next release of SystemRescue CD. I use it for recovering 'lost' partitions
that parted won't even look at (yes I use 1.6.6 from your 0.2.8 CD). I use the
statically linked lde-i386, as downloaded directly from SourceForge, and run
it from a floppy after booting from your SystemRescue CD.
Incidentally, to really mess up a disk's partitions, just create them with
parted, then load Partition Magic and let it 'fix' the 'misalignment' errors
it finds, then watch as neither Partition Magic, nor parted will look at the
disk again. It doesn't always happen, but sometimes yes. One way to avoid this
is if only one person with one set of tools works on a system. Not always possible
unfortunately.
To fix this, I use gpart to give me a list of 'possible' partition locations,
use linux disk editor to view the contents of the partition tables, and a calculator
to determine the 'actual' table locations, then linux disk editor again to edit
the tables so they work. Tedious, but such a relief (especially for the owner)
when it all works again.
I used to boot a DOS floppy and use Norton Disk Editor, but I much prefer to
stay within Linux and use Linux tools.
Thank you for your consideration.
Andrew
Softpanorama Recommended
Main Page - SystemRescueCd
SystemRescueCD
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Recovery disc
- Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Geek To Live- Partition and Image Your Hard Drive with the System ...
LinuxPlanet
- Tutorials - Become A System Rescue Guru With Linux, Part 1 - SystemRescue
CD, the Ultimate Rescue Power ToolCarla
Schroder
Thursday, May 15, 2008 11:44:01
AM
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