[vox-tech] Demonstrations of Linux flexibility?

[Karsten M. Self]

on Fri, Mar 04, 2005 at 07:10:17PM -0500, Peter Jay Salzman (p at dirac.org) wrote:
> On Fri 04 Mar 05,  3:07 PM, Karsten M. Self <kmself at ix.netcom.com> said:
> > I'm looking for examples illustrating the flexibility possible with
> > GNU/Linux.
>  
> Not sure what you exactly mean by flexibility, but this fits my definition.
> 
> My mom's imac had a hard drive failure.  Tried as I might, the drive would
> not mount on Apple hardware.  I tried every conceivable trick one can scour
> from Google.  The drive was toast as far as MacOS was concerned.
> 
> Nevertheless, I gave it a try under Linux (not possible under other OS's to
> my knowledge).
> 
> The drive mounted cleanly on my x86 system running Linux.  Turns out there
> was low level format damage, but it wasn't anywhere near user data.  I got
> 100% of her data back.
> 
> Linux was able to mount and rescue an HFS+ partition even when MacOS
> couldn't (this was pre MacOSX).

I've had a number of comments regarding recovery and forensics.  I
suppose that's worth an entry, though I was looking more for "ongoing
operation" type hacks.

I've certainly got a lot of leverage out of Tom's Root Boot, LNX-BBC,
Knoppix, and similar.  Chrooting into my Debian system, whose root FS
I'd, um, inadvertantly^W inadvisably fscked while mounted, to grab a
package list of all affected packages, reinstall same, whilst running
IRC sessions and otherwise pretty much having access to the system, was
one relatively recent episode.

Contrast with a friend who'se been regaling me with horror stories of
attempting to move WinXP partitions around.  First time he did this it
was in the context of a GNU/Linux dual-boot, now it's just shuffling Win
installs.  I'd mentioned the first time that he would eventually come to
realize that his gripe wasn't with GNU/Linux, it was with Microsoft's
poorly documented and fragile boot configuration, further crippled by
insufficient diagnostic and recovery tools.  He's coming 'round nicely.


Still, while a nice beer-drinking story, not quite what I had in mind.


Peace.

-- 
Karsten M. Self <kmself at ix.netcom.com>        http://kmself.home.netcom.com/
 What Part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
    Itanic is practically dead in the water, but this time the icebergs
    have powerful engines, AMD logos, and good aim.
    - Andrew Grygus
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