Not only Dell desktops, but I just ran into the same issue of not being able to boot from a CD on an HP machine, which boots fine from a USB stick. Also had problems bringing up the BIOS with the keyboard plugged into a USB hub but it worked fine when connected directly to the box for some reason.
This was all a result of trying to replace an existing o.s. with CentOS on the HP box, and despite booting from the stick it froze on kernel panic right away. So I did a netinstall from the CentOS site and it worked like a charm. For any future sys rescue work, I will have to use the USB stick versions, I guess. On Thu, Jan 26, 2012 at 9:40 AM, Greg Rundlett (freephile) < g...@freephile.com> wrote: > On Thu, Jan 26, 2012 at 2:35 AM, Mike Bilow <mik...@colossus.bilow.com>wrote: > >> Filesystems (and therefore "fsck" targets) reside on partitions of the >> disk, something like "/dev/sdc3", rather than the entire device (or an >> image of it). This is inherent in the design of the system and is >> independent of the types of filesystems or how they are mixed. >> >> > Thanks Mike, I knew that, but somehow thought that there was some magic > that I didn't know or understand that would make the computer do what I > wanted as opposed to what I told it to do :-) > > >> In order to access partitions within an image file, you want the "kpartx" >> utility: >> >> http://linux.die.net/man/8/**kpartx<http://linux.die.net/man/8/kpartx> > > > Ahh, that's the part that was missing from all the tutorials/manpages/faqs > that I've read. > > >> >> Also, those annoying Dell machines that will not boot from CD will boot >> from USB Flash memory, and it is easy to make one up with SysRescueCD: >> >> http://www.sysresccd.org/**Sysresccd-manual-en_How_to_** >> install_SystemRescueCd_on_an_**USB-stick<http://www.sysresccd.org/Sysresccd-manual-en_How_to_install_SystemRescueCd_on_an_USB-stick> >> >> Thanks, I plan to give that a try and I'm also going to investigate > setting up a computer on USB stick for my kids. > > >> On 2012-01-26 00:47, Greg Rundlett (freephile) wrote: >> >>> I have an internal hard drive that won't boot. >>> >> [snip] > >> The bad drive in question is 250GB and has a number of partitions and >>> file system types: >>> >> [snip] > >> Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System >>> /dev/sdc1 1 7 56196 de Dell Utility >>> /dev/sdc2 8 1966 15728640 7 HPFS/NTFS >>> /dev/sdc3 * 1966 5881 31453961 7 HPFS/NTFS >>> /dev/sdc4 5882 30401 196956900 5 Extended >>> /dev/sdc5 5882 29402 188932401 83 Linux >>> /dev/sdc6 29403 30401 8024436 82 Linux swap / >>> Solaris >>> >>> I succeeded in creating a copy of the Linux partition using ddrescue > (also called gddrescue in Ubuntu). There were a few errors found and > corrected by fsck. I'll post more details later but at this point I'm > pretty happy to have my data. > > ~ Greg > > _______________________________________________ > gnhlug-discuss mailing list > gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org > http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/ > >
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