Re: Photoscore

[David Kastrup]

David Wright <address@hidden> writes:

> On Tue 29 Nov 2016 at 09:37:21 (+0100), David Kastrup wrote:
>> 
>> My father is living away several hours and is not technically savvy.
>> The system boots into some sort of maintenance mode, so making a disk
>> image via dd via phone instructions is going to be reasonably easy.  He
>> can then send the image over by matter mail.
>
> The one thing I _wouldn't_ want to do is boot the system at all using
> the drive under consideration. If you've lost control of your MBR,
> then all bets are off as to which OS is going to boot and in what
> circumstances. You risk yet more damage to the system.

It boots into some Linux maintenance shell since the boot process does
not find its file systems for mounting.  The risk basically is that the
system in this state has parts overwritten already.

Root or not, this is running in a memory protected environment.  My
experience with hosed and crashing systems has been that it is quite
unusual for trashed code to actually cause more damage than further
crashes.

> If you maintain that the _only_ sensible course of action is: "The
> thing to do IMMEDIATELY is make a "drive image backup" (which is what
> this post appears to be supporting), then you have got to boot from a
> different drive or a device like a CD or stick in order to make an
> unadulterated copy. "Some sort of maintenance mode" doesn't cut it.
> (And I don't even know whether you mean a linux or a windows mode.)

Linux root disk prompt, before the root file system is swapped out for
the real one.

In short, quite a small target to hit.  It's unlikely that it got
clobbered and still starts into a state appearing functional.

-- 
David Kastrup