Re: Photoscore

[David Wright]

On Tue 29 Nov 2016 at 17:20:51 (+0100), David Kastrup wrote:
> David Wright <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> > On Tue 29 Nov 2016 at 16:10:00 (+0100), David Kastrup wrote:
> >> 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.
> >
> > I suppose the good news is that it would appear windows did not make
> > itself the only system that could boot, one of the commonly used
> > tricks up its sleeve. Your earlier post gave me the impression that
> > windows now owned the machine.
> 
> Yeah, it's funny.  I am used to Windows taking over the boot but leaving
> the partitions in peace.  This time it's the other way round.
> 
> >> In short, quite a small target to hit.  It's unlikely that it got
> >> clobbered and still starts into a state appearing functional.
> >
> > So I assume that Grub loaded a linux kernel and an initramfs into
> > memory but that's about it. That gives you a very limited set of tools
> > for recovery and no documentation. A live CD would give you a lot
> > more.
> 
> Recovery over the phone?

Yes, that's what you said.

> Honestly, I am quite more confident dictating
> into a command line than with a graphical environment.

I don't follow. Why would you want to use a graphical environment? In
any case, most recovery tools that I would trust are CLI.

> Even though I am
> frequently annoyed how DECT or whatever codec make a hash of "f" vs "s".

Foxtrot, Sierra, etc will be useful, then.

> And frankly, an initramfs contains more than the kind of stuff I have
> brought Linux (and UNIX since my computing history goes way back before
> 1991) systems up with from floppies and/or QIC tape drives.

Cheers,
David.