[cobalt-users] Re: Cobalt Raq4 Hard Disk on a standard PC

["Neil Stringer" <neil@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Jean

I have just, unwittingly, fried my Raq4s BIOS.  After this amazing faut
pas, I first stuffed the disk into a i386 box and tried to boot from a
RedHat 7.2 (and then 8) CDROM to upgrade the OS so I could at least FTP
some stuff off it.  No, go.  RedHat upgrade first moaned about absolute
links, says they ought to be relative.  I solved this by setting the
drive as a slave and stuffing it into a working Linux (RH 7.2) box and
mounted the partitions (at this time I copied off the interesting
stuff).  This allowed me to make the links relative.  Tried again at
booting from CD and upgrading. this time it winged about hda3 not being
clean and I needed to boot OS and close down cleanly. nice catch 22
there!
During all this time, the Linux upgrade complained about the partition
table being incorrectly aligned. haven't gotten round to putting this in
a Wintel box with partition magic on it to see what is going on, this
will have to wait till I am bored and have time on my hands, until then
the disk rests on a shelf.  Recon this might be part of your problem... 
Now a suggestion at a solution for you.
I don't think you want to touch the partition table, so I don't think
that Ghost is going to help.... Also I am no unix/linux/cobalt guru, but
does 'dd' not make a direct copy, block by block from one device to
another, or if not dd, is there some other unix command that does...
Failing that, what about creating a linux system that has a tar of the
entire device.  You can then clone it (and I guess this is what you
wanted to ghost it for in the first place) to another hdd at will.
Hope this in some way helps.  
Regards
--
Neil Stringer