To recover any Windows 95/NT/2000, OS/2, BeOS or Linux box you may need the tiny linux which fits on a single floppy disk. See the list of tiny floppy linux given below -

It is a good idea to backup the important system files like /etc/fstab, /etc/lilo.conf after you login using Tomsrtbt floppy or RedHat Linux CDROM (Rescue option) in following sections. This can be very handy during crash situation or something happens to system files.

bash# cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.orig
bash# cp /etc/lilo.conf /etc/lilo.conf.orig
bash# cp /etc/hosts /etc/hosts.orig
bash# cp /etc/hosts.allow /etc/hosts.allow.orig
bash# cp /etc/hosts.deny /etc/hosts.deny.orig
bash# cp /etc/inetd.conf /etc/inetd.conf.orig
bash# cp /etc/inittab /etc/inittab.orig
bash# cp /etc/networks /etc/networks.orig

Most of the distributions like RedHat, SUSE, Debian provide CDROM which have "Rescue" option. For this, you have should set the BIOS of your computer to boot first from IDE CDROM drive. Usually you set the BIOS (using F8 key during boot) to boot first from CDROM drive, second from Floppy drive and third from hard disk. Load the Linux cdrom into the CD drive and reboot the system. The Linux distribution will load and at the prompt select "Rescue Operation". In the resuce operation mount the hard disks and try to repair.

# chroot /mnt/SYSIMAGE
# df 

After doing chroot, the system will look as if you had booted the system from hard disk. You can see all the partitions and you can repair or recover the files.

Follow these steps to recover from LILO or system failures.

You should take the following pre-cautionary measures to tackle the problems in future.

You can replace the boot sector with the DOS boot loader by issuing the DOS command at MS DOS prompt:

	FDISK  /MBR

where MBR stands for "Master Boot Record".

See also LILO documentation on linux at /usr/doc/lilo* for other methods of uninstalling the LILO. And see also 'man lilo'.

After making changes to /etc/lilo.conf you MUST run lilo to make changes to go in effect. It is a very common mistake committed by newusers. Type -

bash# lilo -v -v -v

The following tools are available:

If you're trying to rescue a system with a corrupted partition table on the main (boot) disk which is unable to boot you have two options:

After booting, look if your hard disk has been detected by your system by entering a shell and typing "dmesg". Under e.g. Linux you should look out for lines like "hdc: ST320430A, 19569MB w/512kB Cache, CHS=39761/16/63". If you have booted with a rescue disk mount the floppy disk with gpart on, and cd to the mount point.

# To read the online manual page on gpart do :
bash$ man gpart

bash$ gpart --help
gpart: invalid option -- -
Usage: gpart [options] device
Options: [-b <backup MBR>][-C c,h,s][-c][-d][-E][-e][-f][-g][-h][-i]
         [-K <last sector>][-k <# of sectors>][-L][-l <log file>]
         [-n <increment>][-q][-s <sector-size>][-t <module-name>]
         [-V][-v][-W <device>][-w <module-name,weight>]
gpart v0.1h (c) 1999-2001 Michail Brzitwa <michail@brzitwa.de>.
Guess PC-type hard disk partitions.

Now run "gpart /dev/[lt ]your disk[gt ]", e.g. "gpart /dev/hdc". Without any options, gpart performs a standard scan, and merely looks if it can guess a consistent primary partition table. A typical positive output looks like:

Begin scan...
Possible partition(DOS FAT), size(3999mb), offset(0mb)
Possible extended partition at offset(4000mb)
  Possible partition(Windows NTFS), size(3999mb), offset(4000mb)
  Possible partition(Linux ext2), size(3072mb), offset(8000mb)
  Possible partition(Linux ext2), size(3072mb), offset(11072mb)
Possible partition(Linux ext2), size(3072mb), offset(14144mb)
Possible partition(Linux ext2), size(2353mb), offset(17216mb)
End scan.
Checking partitions...
Partition(DOS or Windows 95 with 32 bit FAT): primary
  Partition(OS/2 HPFS, NTFS, QNX or Advanced UNIX): logical
  Partition(Linux ext2 filesystem): logical
  Partition(Linux ext2 filesystem): logical
Partition(Linux ext2 filesystem): primary
Partition(Linux ext2 filesystem): primary
Ok.
Guessed primary partition table:
Primary partition(1)
  type: 011(0x0B)(DOS or Windows 95 with 32 bit FAT)
  size: 3999mb #s(8191953) s(63-8192015)
  chs:  (0/1/1)-(1023/15/63)d (0/1/1)-(8126/15/63)r
Primary partition(2)
  type: 005(0x05)(Extended DOS)
  size: 10144mb #s(20775888) s(8192016-28967903)
  chs:  (1023/15/63)-(1023/15/63)d (8127/0/1)-(28737/15/63)r
Primary partition(3)
  type: 131(0x83)(Linux ext2 filesystem)
  size: 3072mb #s(6291456) s(28967904-35259359)
  chs:  (1023/15/63)-(1023/15/63)d (28738/0/1)-(34979/8/24)r
Primary partition(4)
  type: 131(0x83)(Linux ext2 filesystem)
  size: 2353mb #s(4819248) s(35259840-40079087)
  chs:  (1023/15/63)-(1023/15/63)d (34980/0/1)-(39760/15/63)r

Now if after the check-phase it says Ok, you should check the proposed partition table very carefully. After that you may write back the guessed table by calling "gpart -W /dev/hdc /dev/hdc" (exchange /dev/hdc with your disk device). When gpart has successfully written the new primary partition table, cross your fingers and reboot.

If gpart says it found inconsistencies, you are a bit on your own. What you can do is to fiddle with gparts numerous options. For example, to scan on sector boundaries instead of head boundaries, give it the "-n s" option. Normally gpart skips the disk space a possible partition seems to occupy, to really scan the whole disk, add the "-f" option. Read the man page and improvise.

The gpart tries to guess which partitions are on a hard disk. If the primary partition table has been lost, overwritten or destroyed the partitions still exist on the disk but the operating system cannot access them.

gpart ignores the primary partition table and scans the disk (or disk image, file) sector after sector for several filesystem/partition types. It does so by "asking" filesystem recognition modules if they think a given sequence of sectors resembles the beginning of a filesystem or partition type. Currently the following filesystem types are known to gpart (listed by module names) : beos, bsddl, ext2, fat, hmlvm, lswap, minix, ntfs, qnx4, rfs, s86dl, xfs.

See also "http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/mini/Partition-Rescue/index.html"

PDF file can be generated from postscript file using either acrobat distill or Ghostscript . And postscript file is generated from DVI which in turn is generated from LaTex file. You can download distill software from "http://www.adobe.com" . Given below is a sample session:

bash$ man sgml2latex
bash$ sgml2latex filename.sgml
bash$ man dvips
bash$ dvips -o filename.ps filename.dvi
bash$ distill filename.ps
bash$ man ghostscript
bash$ man ps2pdf
bash$ ps2pdf input.ps output.pdf
bash$ acroread output.pdf &

Or you can use Ghostscript command ps2pdf . ps2pdf is a work-alike for nearly all the functionality of Adobe's Acrobat Distiller product: it converts PostScript files to Portable Document Format (PDF) files. ps2pdf is implemented as a very small command script (batch file) that invokes Ghostscript, selecting a special "output device" called pdfwrite . In order to use ps2pdf, the pdfwrite device must be included in the makefile when Ghostscript was compiled; see the documentation on building Ghostscript for details.

This document is written in linuxdoc SGML format. The Docbook SGML format supercedes the linuxdoc format and has lot more features than linuxdoc. The linuxdoc is very simple and is easy to use. To convert linuxdoc SGML file to Docbook SGML use the program ld2db.sh and some perl scripts. The ld2db output is not 100[percnt] clean and you need to use the clean[lowbar]ld2db.pl perl script. You may need to manually correct few lines in the document.

The ld2db.sh is not 100[percnt] clean, you will get lots of errors when you run

	bash$ ld2db.sh file-linuxdoc.sgml db.sgml
	bash$ cleanup.pl db.sgml > db_clean.sgml
	bash$ gvim db_clean.sgml 
	bash$ docbook2html db.sgml

And you may have to manually edit some of the minor errors after running the perl script. For e.g. you may need to put closing tag < /Para> for each < Listitem>

You can convert the SGML howto document to Microsoft Windows Help file, first convert the sgml to html using:

	bash$ sgml2html xxxxhowto.sgml     (to generate html file)
	bash$ sgml2html -split 0   xxxxhowto.sgml (to generate a single page html file)

Then use the tool HtmlToHlp . You can also use sgml2rtf and then use the RTF files for generating winhelp files.

In order to view the document in dvi format, use the xdvi program. The xdvi program is located in tetex-xdvi*.rpm package in Redhat Linux which can be located through ControlPanel [verbar] Applications [verbar] Publishing [verbar] TeX menu buttons. To read dvi document give the command -

          xdvi -geometry 80x90 howto.dvi man xdvi 
        

And resize the window with mouse. To navigate use Arrow keys, Page Up, Page Down keys, also you can use 'f', 'd', 'u', 'c', 'l', 'r', 'p', 'n' letter keys to move up, down, center, next page, previous page etc. To turn off expert menu press 'x'.

You can read postscript file using the program 'gv' (ghostview) or 'ghostscript'. The ghostscript program is in ghostscript*.rpm package and gv program is in gv*.rpm package in Redhat Linux which can be located through ControlPanel [verbar] Applications [verbar] Graphics menu buttons. The gv program is much more user friendly than ghostscript. Also ghostscript and gv are available on other platforms like OS/2, Windows 95 and NT, you view this document even on those platforms.

To read postscript document give the command -

          gv howto.ps ghostscript howto.ps 
        

You can read HTML format document using Netscape Navigator, Microsoft Internet explorer, Redhat Baron Web browser or any of the 10 other web browsers.

You can read the latex, LyX output using LyX a X-Windows front end to latex.