A simple job, stick a 500mb drive in, make a new partition out of spare space, and tar it over. A few minutes in, garbage appears during tar, which i initially attributed to screwy characters in a dos filename. But it seems that instead, it was on some kind of rampage through the rest of my hard drive. I'm amazed at what was recovered, but i'm missing random pieces here & there. Like my entire mail directory. But the papers for my job search are still there (once apache & a few others were reinstalled. I had to reinstall everything . . .).
I went into fdisk to make the new partition. SHould have been no problem; I've only allocated half an 8G disk (too long to wait for e2fsck on big partitions). BUt it said the disk was full. THis didn't seem right, so i used cfdsik to look at it, which happily reported 3g at the end. I had it add a 1g logical, and off I went. I'm wondering if it did something funny, such as stretch the partition extended partition, as it fit's *exactly*. Here's the table: eyry:/home/hawk# fdisk -l The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 16278. This is larger than 1024, and may cause problems with: 1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., LILO) 2) booting and partitioning software form other OSs (e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK) Disk /dev/hda: 16 heads, 63 sectors, 16278 cylinders Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 bytes Device Boot Begin Start End Blocks Id System /dev/hda1 1 1 128 64480+ 83 Linux native /dev/hda2 129 129 256 64512 6 DOS 16-bit >=32M /dev/hda3 257 257 11180 5505696 5 Extended /dev/hda5 257 257 6498 3145936+ 83 Linux native /dev/hda6 6144 6499 6758 131008+ 82 Linux swap /dev/hda7 6144 6759 7018 131008+ 82 Linux swap /dev/hda8 6144 7019 9099 1048792+ 83 Linux native /dev/hda9 8192 9100 11180 1048792+ 83 Linux native Disk /dev/hdb: 32 heads, 63 sectors, 524 cylinders Units = cylinders of 2016 * 512 bytes Device Boot Begin Start End Blocks Id System /dev/hdb1 * 1 1 523 527152+ 6 DOS 16-bit >=32M /dev/hda9 is the new partition, and i used tar -zcv to wrap up the contents of /dev/hdb1. Or so i thought. I seem to have everything working again, save that exmh claims not to work: eyryttyp0:hawk>which exmh /usr/bin/exmh eyryttyp0:hawk>echo $PATH /usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/bin/X11:/usr/games:/bin/athna:/usr/athena/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin:/usr/bin/mh eyryttyp0:hawk>exmh exmh: Command not found. eyryttyp0:hawk>/usr/bin/exmh /usr/bin/exmh: Command not found. and ppp-pam is apparently doing something bad during install: Unpacking ppp-pam (from .../net/ppp-pam_2.3.5-2.deb) ... Adding `diversion of /usr/sbin/pppd to /usr/sbin/pppd.ppp-pam by ppp-pam' dpkg-divert: rename involves overwriting `/usr/sbin/pppd.ppp-pam' with different file `/usr/sbin/pppd', not allowed dpkg: error processing debian/dists/stable/main/binary-i386/net/ppp-pam_2.3.5-2.deb (--install): subprocess pre-installation script returned error exit status 2 rick, the tired, who isn't going to make it back hoe 7 hours ago on this 20 minute trip . . .