Re: Crashed hard disk - no jehad

[Oommen Thomas <oommen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 22 May 2000, Prabhu Ramachandran wrote:

<prabhu>hi,
<prabhu>
<prabhu>On Mon, 22 May 2000, Dr. P. Sriram wrote:
<prabhu>
<prabhu>> would mount /usr as read-only (journaling not needed); the file systems
<prabhu>> that are written to may be made journaling (reiserfs or xfs, when that
<prabhu>> becomes available) so they will also not suffer from a power outage. many
<prabhu>
<prabhu>	You can add ext3 (Stephen Tweedie is funded by redhat for this)
<prabhu>and jfs (IBM's journalling fs) to that list of journalled fs's.
<prabhu>
<prabhu>prabhu
<prabhu>
<prabhu>---


There is something else missed out by Prabhu and Dr Sriram.
Unless there is a hardware failkure and the HDD is physically damaged,
most user data can be recovered fully, provided the partition table is
intact.

If the user data reside in separate partitions, and not everything in the
/ , then most probably the crash affects the system partitions only.
Although the HDD will not boot by itself, you can always mount any of
these partitions on another Linux machine and recover every single byte.
I have done this many times myself.

It is even posible to recover the carshed HDD (depending on the extent of
damagae) by some tricky copy of binaries from another identical Linux
machine. Although I have done this too, I dont recommaned this, as it is
not worth the effort/time.

To sum up, unless there is a hardware failure, rarely will Linux crash
fully, if properly configured/installed. This is not the case with other
OSs.


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