Recover from system down status

[Liam Proven]

On 2 May 2011 21:00, chris <chevhq at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 2011-05-02 at 12:01 +0100, Liam Proven wrote:
>> On 1 May 2011 21:29, PIYUSH SINGH <meetpiyush2006 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> >
>> >
> <snip>
>>
>> If you didn't... You tried an operating system upgrade on a
>> single-volume machine with vitally important files on it with no
>> backup? Are you completely mad?
>>
>> Using a live CD, I'd try to recover what you can, then unmount the
>> volume, use fsck to repair it, then you /might/ be able to remount it
>> R/W and change the permissions. I would not hold out a huge amount of
>> hope, though.
>>
> having had a similar issue in the past with power failures, combined
> with my ups blowing up I did the following.
> download a copy of partition magic.  burnt the iso using a friends
> computer and recovered the important stuff to a usb key.
> Sorry I don't have an url for Partition Magic, but a quick google should
> find it.

Um, for what it's worth, PartitionMagic was a good solution a few
years ago but is less so now.

[1] It's proprietary paid-for software & so downloads etc. are
illegal. (Older versions were given away on cover disks &c, but
still...

[2] It's not been updated since PartitionMagic 8 in 2004, so it does
not support recent Linux filesystems such as ext4.

[3] It's purely a partition-management tool. It might help to recover
a partition which was damaged, e.g. by a power failure in the middle
of being moved or something, but it will not let you mount a partition
or access its contents.

I was a big fan of PartitionMagic since I reviewed it in about 1995 -
here's a later review of mine from 1998:
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/utilities/2230/partitionmagic-4

(Australasian readers might have seen that in PC @uthority. :¬) )

But it's long-dead now, alas, since Symantec bought it and killed it.

PartEd is the modern FOSS equivalent, which is on the Ubuntu LiveCD -
which is why I recommended that. An Ubuntu LiveCD will not only let
you edit partitions, like PartitionMagic, but also fsck them, mount
them, inspect and recover their contents.

-- 
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