Andy Piercy wrote:
I only have the Unix OS distribution floppies and not
the applications.
So can I rebuild a working disk by..
1) Use the floppies to build a new operating system on to the 442Mb drive.
2) Mount the faulty 144 Mb drive with all of the apps etc.
3) Copy using cp, tar, cpio, all of the contents from the faulty drive to
the new drive and over write
all of the os, will this work?
I think I'd do it something like:
1) 'dd' the small drive to temporary storage on a Linux box (or
whatever) "just in case"
2) Boot the system with the larger disk in and do an install from floppy.
3) Reboot the system with the smaller drive fitted as a second disk.
4) Use 'find', 'diff' etc. to work out differences between the two and
copy files across from the small disk accordingly.
If the small drive goes bang during that process you've always got the Linux
raw backup which can be put onto any old drive (raw) and booted from (I'd
suggest using a sacrificial drive to *test* your backup as step 1.5 above,
incidentally :-)
I can't remember what system it is now (or if you even said), but the
important thing to do is generally not to overwrite any boot information
(which on most systems also means not overwriting / moving the kernel).
Providing the system can execute the boot code, locate and start the kernel
the the filesystem driver(s) should take over and be able to find all the
other files on the disk.
cheers
Jules