Booting an old hard drive

[gwhite]

Have had Suse Linux running for almost 10 years with no problems. (since 1999) Tried to boot and the screen came up with a blinking cursor.
Lost boot floppy recently when it got dusty.
I think the Suse version is like 1.2 ??? ( not sure).
Don't have original discs.
However, have a complete backup of data on old slave
but missing a few key scripts which I would like to recover.

Installed open Suse 11.0 onto new hard drive
and made old hard drive a slave. Read lots
of articles on web which showed how to mount it.
However, the old Suse hard drive will not act as a slave
It actually crashes the OS and I get like 0000XX000 on
the screen. Figured if I got the old hard drive as a slave
I could just copy out the awk scripts and junk the old drive

I looked at the web sites which show you how to create
a boot floppy but I don't know the image to use. I tried
using the exact code in the article but it would not boot the drive.
Also, I might have done it wrong since the instructions were
a little confusing to me.

Where do I go from here? Can't find help in user group
or with Professional stores as none support Linux in my area.
George White

[Jonathan183]

Welcome to the forums George

Can you install both hard drives in the same machine and get the system to boot if you make your original hard drive the master? if you can then use recovery option booting from the cd and install grub to the MBR of the original hard drive.

If you have a live CD to boot from then use that to manually install grub ... if you need more help with this option boot from the live CD with both drives in the system and run

su -
fdisk -l

and post the output here.

[gwhite]

Thanks, Had not thought of that approach at all.
I will try it tonight when I get a chance.
It might work.

[gwhite]

Happy to report that I was able to get at my awk scripts
on the old drive and do some work.

Basically, I set the old drive as master and put the Suse 11.0
cdrom in the drive. When the bios showed, I hit F6-10 and got a
screen giving me the option to boot from CDROM. Open Suse 11.0
loaded the kernel and gave me a lot of repair and rescue options.
The drive is in bad shape since it could not be repaired.
The boot loader could not be written to the disk because the
OS version on the old drive was ancient. The
OS took me into a screen where I could choose to boot from the
root directory on the old drive. I hit enter and it booted just fine
asking for root password which I had. However, it took me into
read only but gave me the command to change to read/write.

So I am in good shape. Thanks for your help. Now I want to make
a backup of the old drive and get rid of it forever. If I just add a
slave, can I copy the entire content and get a secure bootable drive?

[Jonathan183]

If you add a slave you should be able to mount a partition on the slave and copy the information across from your old drive. I'd copy the data to a separate data partition on another drive or copy the info to a home area rather than trying to copy the OS and boot it. I guess since you have been using Linux for a while you don't need help mounting partitions and copying information ... sounds like you are nearly there ... good luck and let us know how things work out