Old harddrive repair

[Ctazzz]

Tex has a very good post about how to install multiple desktop environments.  I'll see if I can find it again.

http://www.pclinuxos.com/forum/index.php?topic=58268.0

OK, not as detailed as I thought, but I think detailed enough to work with.

Thank you Joble, but something is either no longer in the Synaptic or the naming criteria has changed. I tried the task-ldxe asearch after reloading synaptic as directed and I had no files listed. Has the repository been changed?

Ctazzz

[Joble]

I'll have to check, but, lxde is not kde, you should be looking for task-kde maybe?

Hmm, dead end, there is a task-lxde and a task-xfce but not for kde, not sure then how to go about installing it with gnome.

There is a task-gnome so you could install the kde version and add gnome to that, if the effort is worth it to you.

[Ctazzz]

I think I am going to set up another small system using the PCLOS MiniMe 2008 clean install on another hd, remove the existing system hd, do the recommended update to 2009 Minime per the Forum directions, run the recommended file list for KDE environment, do all the updates and installs for that, and see how it runs in comparison to Gnome environment. I do know that KDE is a more powerful, and versatile environment than the Zen MiniMe, but I will say that Zen runs great (very stable) if every thing installed is Gnome-based and the network is hard-wire. The wireless side of the livecd needs some adjustment (or perhaps have Mandi included on the lived transfer on installation) if I am understanding what is happening under a particular wireless situation.

I appreciate your help Joble,

Thanks and have a great day,
Ctazzz

[Was_Just19]

When I first started working with distros, (haven't  been doing it long), I had a couple of hard drives loose identification and were not seen by livecd when I went to reinstall. I tried using the oem harddrive diagnostic tools, and reformatted ntfs, thinking that was all I needed to bring the harddrive back into service, but the distros would still not see the drive. When I went back to the diagnostic tools, redid the mbr, and formatted to fat32, the harddrives would often become usable again. Just a little more time consuming, but did save a few dollars I could not afford to spend at the time. Hope this helps.

Ctazzz

You can have a small corruption of the partition table which can cause some oddities. There are some utilities which can re-write it to correct any problems.

testdisk   is in the PCLinuxOS and can be invaluable; also fdisk, sfdisk and cfdisk. Photorec for recovering lost files if they have not been overwritten.
The  dd  command is useful for zeroing out a partition or drive, duplicating and so on.
Of course we also have dd_rescue.

For dealing with old drives those should be very useful ..... or at least I have found them to be so.

regards.

[Ctazzz]

Does testdisk run on Gnome?

Thanks,
Ctazzz

[djohnston]

testdisk is run in a terminal. From the manpage,

OPTIONS
       /log   create a testdisk.log file

       /debug add debug information

       /dump  dump raw sectors

       /list  display current partitions

From Synaptic description:

Tool to check and undelete partition
Tool to check and undelete partition. Works with the following
partitions:
- FAT12 FAT16 FAT32
- Linux
- Linux SWAP (version 1 and 2)
- NTFS (Windows NT/W2K/XP)
- BeFS (BeOS)
- UFS (BSD)
- Netware
- ReiserFS