Re: Photoscore

[David Kastrup]

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?  Honestly, I am quite more confident dictating
into a command line than with a graphical environment.  Even though I am
frequently annoyed how DECT or whatever codec make a hash of "f" vs "s".

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.

-- 
David Kastrup