This turned out to be a very interesting question. There are lots of links out there on this topic but they are ambiguous in describing the difference/relationship between the two. Best description I’ve found of the hard drive configuration for a Windows OS is this one: http://www.ntfs.com/hard-disk-basics.htm. It appears that MBR and Partition Table are … Read more
Create a disk image. The following command will create a 10G sparse image: # dd if=/dev/zero of=mydisk.img bs=1 count=0 seek=10G 0+0 records in 0+0 records out 0 bytes (0 B) copied, 1.6554e-05 s, 0.0 kB/s # ls -lh mydisk.img -rw-r–r–. 1 root root 10G Jun 17 15:27 mydisk.img Partition the image with fdisk: # fdisk … Read more
You’re looking at a lost cause. Save the data you need, and reinstall the operating system.
You can indeed use Grub to boot once only. You can also specify a fallback boot. Essentially, you use default saved at the start of your grub.conf, to indicate that you want to boot a saved entry by default. Then at the end of your experimental boot, use savedefault # to set the older boot … Read more
The boot messages come in two parts: those that come from the kernel (loading drivers, detecting partitions, etc) and those that come from the services starting up ([ OK ] Starting Apache…). The kernel messages are stored in /var/log/kern.log and can also be accessed from the kernel’s own log buffer with the dmesg program. The … Read more
I know of a clever variant of Option 1 called Mandos. It uses a combination of a GPG key pair, Avahi, SSL and IPv6 all added to your initial RAM disk to securely retrieve its root partition’s key password. If the Mandos server isn’t present on the LAN your server is an encrypted brick or … Read more
It is possible to boot your Windows installed on your computer in a VM running on a Linux installed on the same computer. The only thing to remember: do not mount a partition on both OS. I’ve used this setup in qemu, kvm and VirtualBox. EDIT: The ideea is to use the entire physical disk … Read more
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Add. Sense: Unrecovered read error – auto reallocate failed Looks like the drive has bad sectors and is unable to reallocate these (possibly because it’s run out of spare sectors). The output of smartctl -a /dev/sda would give you more information on the state of the drive.
You can change the order by renaming the symlinks under /etc/rcX.d/ where x will be your run level. You’ll see a bunch of files starting with Sxx or Kxx. S links are traced during startup while the K ones are parsed for shutdown. The xx here represents the order. But this order is set for … Read more
Following command will remove ALL kernel versions, except for the one that you’re currently running: sudo yum remove `rpm -q kernel | grep -v ‘uname -r’` and for going forward, per 7.4. Configuring Yum and Yum Repositories: installonly_limit=value …where value is an integer representing the maximum number of versions that can be installed simultaneously for … Read more