A portable bootable version?

What I have been doing for some time now is installing linux on my tech machine at work, plugging in devices and transferring data with dd_rescue.

What I need now is a version of linux that I can install on a laptop sata hard drive and be able to plug it into any machine to transfer data off of raids which wont work in my tech machine.

Example and problem:

I've got a DELL pci raid card with 3 striped 80 gig sata hard drives in it. The motherboard that it was installed on went bad. I need to be able to get the data off the drives and onto another hard drive. I believe this is possible because the 3 drives show up as 1 150ish gig hard drive when I boot to the linux mint, fedora, and ubuntu live cds. What the problem is is when I try to get the computer to boot off my fully updated and installed linux hard drive it wont mount the file system. /root/dev/sdb. The only thing it does is "crash" to busybox (which I am beginning to hate seeing.)

Does anyone know if I can install puppylinux, or DSL or another flavor of linux on a laptop hard drive that I can plug into almost ANY system, boot it, and use dd_rescue?

I'd just keep using mint, but for some reason it wont boot. Which is quite surprising to me.

You should be able to install DSL or puppy to a jump drive or an external hard drive and plug it in and boot it..

the problem I am running into is after I install any version of linux it wont boot. Gives me error 17.

But that isn't the real issue. The issue is can I even get the data off the stupid raid? its striped. the motherboard failed, but the dell card is good. I put it into another machine, but its giving me a hell of a lot of trouble. sometimes on boot it says the raid is functional, but as of late its saying its not and needs to be rebuilt. If I rebuild the array will it destroy the data on the drives?

Methal said:

If I rebuild the array will it destroy the data on the drives?

Click to expand...

Do you have a backup of the disk(s)?

Methal said:

the problem I am running into is after I install any version of linux it wont boot. Gives me error 17.

But that isn't the real issue. The issue is can I even get the data off the stupid raid? its striped. the motherboard failed, but the dell card is good. I put it into another machine, but its giving me a hell of a lot of trouble. sometimes on boot it says the raid is functional, but as of late its saying its not and needs to be rebuilt. If I rebuild the array will it destroy the data on the drives?

Click to expand...

Rebuilding generally means it will destroy the data. What OS was on the system before? Were you booting off the array or do you have an OS drive that it boots from? What file system is on the array? Multiple partitions? 3 80GB drives showing ~150GB sounds like RAID 5 is that correct?

pharoer said:

Do you have a backup of the disk(s)?

Click to expand...

nope. It wont boot. The array says that one of the disks is going bad.

Zerix01 said:

Rebuilding generally means it will destroy the data. What OS was on the system before? Were you booting off the array or do you have an OS drive that it boots from? What file system is on the array? Multiple partitions? 3 80GB drives showing ~150GB sounds like RAID 5 is that correct?

Click to expand...

The raid OS is Windows Server 2003.

It wont boot off the array because it is from a dell server, it gives me an error that says "Can not boot because the hardware is not dell ****" in different words. same meaning.

The File system is partitioned into 4 active partitions, FAT16, FAT32, and two NTFS's. (hell if I know why they did it like that, this thing was built by idiots as far as I can tell...)

I believe it is raid 5. I don't know a whole lot about the different raid versions, all I do know is it is striped. No back up, 3 drives raided into one. I am currently doing a full test on each drive to find out if the hardware is failing. 1 is done, it takes about an hour to do each.

I installed linux mint both 64 bit and 32 bit onto a new hard drive, but got grub error 17 when I tried to reboot after installation. I tried booting to XP, and Vista to get the data off the drives, Vista is not supported, no drivers for the card, and XP wouldn't mount (initialize) the drives, it seems to think there is an I/O error. however I don't think that is correct. When I boot to fedora it sees 140ish gigs of data, but says it is unmountable, so I can not manipulate it, (copy/paste, cut etc.). So I know the data is there.

in XP i tried to run takeown, and robocopy 3.0 with no success.

Dell wants 1500 bucks + the price of a hard drive, and 2 to 6 weeks to "restore the data" and claims that they are the only people who can do it.

nope. It wont boot. The array says that one of the disks is going bad.

Click to expand...

This means your data is obviously worthless to you. Just reformat.

Methal said:

The raid OS is Windows Server 2003.

Click to expand...

And this usually means Linux is the wrong OS to try to mount the disks as a raid. You can try the various FakeRAID howtos however of course.

Tho one shot worth trying is to install Windows on ANOTHER disk, boot from that and then try to mount the disks in there.

Error17 usually seems to happen to me when I change the drive order in BIOS; e.g. grub can't find itself so it can't load the grub menu.
I've only had this issue with SATA drives in the system, too.
You might be able to get it booted by changing the BIOS boot order.

Another option would be to remaster a liveCD that has what you want on it.

I did it =D

Took all the hard drives out of the system except for the 3 on raid card, and 1 500 gig sata.

I booted to linux mint live CD opened the terminal and installed DD_rescue.

DD_rescue transfers data in 63k size chunks until it hits a bad sector and then switches to 512bite size chunks so it can get as much of the data around the bad sector as possible. VERY powerful cloning tool. Clones Vista without a problem.

I used Gparted to view the partitions of the raid, and to find out which /dev it was assigned.

The raid drives showed up but would not mount. I couldn't view the files either.

tried a shot in the dark with sudo dd_rescue /dev/sda /dev/sdb

started transfering. after a good hour not only did I get all the files back, but the 500 gig is now partitioned exactly as the 3 striped drives were. In otherwords it is bootable. Not important that it boots, but the guy got his crap back.

The raid wont boot, and It still says its failed, and needs to be rebuilt every time its bios loads. I have no idea why.

pharoer said:

And this usually means Linux is the wrong OS to try to mount the disks as a raid. You can try the various FakeRAID howtos however of course.

Click to expand...

He was using a RAID controller card. Not using Windows software RAID. There should be no problems with linux seeing the array as one big drive since the RAID card takes care of the technical stuff.

The raid wont boot, and It still says its failed, and needs to be rebuilt every time its bios loads. I have no idea why.

Click to expand...

So I take it now that you have a backup of the array, you have rebuilt the array and the controller is still giving you this error? It looks like something else has failed too. I really don't care for RAID controllers. Since the motherboard is being replaced and everything pretty much needs to be re-done now, maybe you should try out Linux software RAID. I can given you some very simple guides to help you out with that, and it will make life a lot easier when hardware ultimately fails again in the furture.