My day off, to work on a project when I got asked to sort out a problem. A Linux system I setup with Suse a few months back on it has crashed. By the look of it a hard disk was having difficulties- it only booted intermittently- and it was manufactured in January 2006!

I wondered if something had damaged the Linux box as it was failing to boot with a Kernel Panic error. Couldn’t find a bootable partition. I don’t blame the hard disk manufacturers as the hard disk in this was replaced a few months ago. Dodgy controller perhaps?

So I had an unbootable disk (formatted with Reiser FS) containing very important customer data (backups! Don’t ask- they do not know how lucky they were- someone there had switched off backups a few months ago!).

There are some pretty amazing open source utilities and Yareg (which is a front end to the excellent RFS Tools) let me plug the drive (which was Sata- thankfully Maplin sell a USB- SATA drive enclosure) into My XP box. I was then able to see all the folders and files and drag and drop the mysql database and website files onto my XP box. It looked like the disk, though failing had not corrupted anything.

One last trick. If you have the correct version of Mysql – you can download them from mysql.org, install, run it, set up default root admin etc then close it down. Now copy the mysql data files into the data folder and restart mysql. It’s quick and dirty but it sems to work ok. Result… I could view the data. It was from a live system and the latest update date was last night. Phew=-All data rescued!