[TriLUG] One thing led to another and killed my Samsung Ultrabook running Linux Mint.

[David Burton via TriLUG]

Yeah, the first thing I'd do is boot a "live" distro from CD or thumbdrive,
and use it to clone the HDD to a backup drive, or at least backup your
important files.

However, I'd use ddrescue
<http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/manual/ddrescue_manual.html> rather
than dd to copy the HDD. If your HDD is starting to fail, ddrescue will
nevertheless recover whatever it is possible to recover. Be sure to use it
with a "log file" so that it can resume if it is interrupted.

Assuming you've booted from a CD, and your old HDD is /dev/sda, and your
USB-attached new or scratch HDD is /dev/sdb, and your thumbdrive's data
partition is /dev/sdc1, then do it like this:

1. verify which is which of the three drives:

fdisk -lu


*Be very, very sure you don't mix them up, lest you destroy all your
data!!!*

2. copy the drive:

mount /dev/sdc1 /media/sdc1
cd /media/sdc1
mkdir rescue_hdd
cd rescue_hdd
ddrescue -B -f /dev/sda /dev/sdb drive.log



Dave



On Thu, May 21, 2015 at 2:31 PM, Joseph Mack NA3T via TriLUG <
trilug at trilug.org> wrote:

> On Thu, 21 May 2015, Jeremy Davis via TriLUG wrote:
>
>  So I need help getting back in.
>>
>
> it's completely possible that your apps are stewed. However the user code
> should have survived what you did.
>
> Before you start reinstalling and getting too far from the state the
> machine was in when it started having trouble, you might want to do some
> sanity checks. Is your disk OK? (run the smartctl long test `smartctl -t
> long /dev/sda`, from a livecd eg systemrescue disk).
>
> If it's OK make a dd copy of the disk, then start messing with the disk
>
> Joe