System Rescue CD [LWN.net]

System Rescue CD

Posted May 19, 2006 15:58 UTC (Fri) by Ed_L. (guest, #24287) [Link]

Null set, pflugstad. Earlier this month I configured a new workstation to boot multiple Linux Distros, so I needed a partition editor somewhat more capable than the pathetic excuse that is Fedora's Disk Druid.

(Actually, Disk Druid does fine if you are fine with what it does. But a clue as to the rational behind its decisions in the release notes or marginal help would be useful, as would an "expert customization" button that would allow one to opt for [G|Qt]Parted instead.)

But as such option is sorely lacking in FC-5, I was reduced to using a third-party parted LiveCD for the initial disk partitioning. My first choice was Gparted LiveCD 0.2.4-3 (latest). It would not partition my primary SATA drive. Next was the latest SystemRescue CD. It would not partition the SATA drive either. If your mileage has varied, I'd certainly like to know.

Yes, Knoppix 4.0.2 from 7 months ago should certainly be considered unnecessary overkill for such a simple job. But it was necessary, and Knoppix certainly did kill it.

As an aside on FC-5, the mainboard is an Abit AT8 RD480-M1575, so loading Linux at all was a bit of a gamble. The distro's I tried were FC-5, CentOS 4.3, and the work-alike Scientific Linux 4.3. FC-5 x86-64 was the only 64bit viersion that would even load in this board: an Nividia support engineer informed me that x86-64 kernels earlier than 2.6.14 cannot cope with the RD480's lack of an extended IOMMU. The 32-bit versions of these 4.3-based distros loaded fine. Once in Xorg (version 6.8.2) however, both suffered from insufferable keyboard repeats both from PS/2 and USB connected MS keyboards. Killing X revealed system warnings about "unable to debounce port xxxx" or some such. I dunno, the problem was blatant in X but not observed at the console.

Either way, FC-5 and Xorg 7.0.0 do not have this problem, so FC-5 thusfar is the only distro (32 bit or 64) I've tried that will work on this board. Not yet work acceptably of course, as Xinerama is apparently broken in Xorg 7.0. However, version 7.1 should be released today, and I hope fixed rpm's will be available sometime next week.

But thanks for your suggestion.

System Rescue CD

Posted May 19, 2006 18:42 UTC (Fri) by pflugstad (subscriber, #224) [Link]

What on earth does this have to do with what I posted?

I was meerly pointing out that rather than opting for a 300+ MB live CD with basically JUST GParted on it, you could get the 128 MB System Rescue CD, which includes the exact same thing (well, QtParted, but the underlying functioality is the same) and a lot lot more. System Rescue CD is NOT a distro. It's a RESCUE CD.

Sure, Disk Druid in FC probably sucks. I don't recall ever having used it.

Parted also has it's warts (which I have run into, especially with SATA), and often those are also kernel problems (so they'd affect any distro using the same kernel). And the comments about your mobo problems seem equally irrelevant to my posting: kernel problems with fairly bleeding edge hardware are nothing new.

Anyway, back to our regularly scheduled program...

System Rescue CD

Posted May 19, 2006 19:40 UTC (Fri) by Ed_L. (guest, #24287) [Link]

Sorry, you are absolutely correct and I was far too verbose. The short answer is that neither Gparted nor System Rescue's QtParted would parted my SATA drive. Knoppix's would. Period.

Thanks.

System Rescue CD

Posted May 19, 2006 20:14 UTC (Fri) by h2 (guest, #27965) [Link]

Ed_L, I've found that in certain circumstances gparted 0.1 successfully partitioned etc a disk where 0.2 failed, so I just keep a few copies around.

It's my guess that the reason knoppix worked for you, the old version, was exactly because of this oddity, you were simply using an older release of parted within knoppix.

I just keep all my gparted livecds now, usually the latest doesn't work.

It has however worked fine on all the sata drives I've run it on so far, but that probably will vary motherboard to motherboard, sata chipset to sata chipset.

Overall, however, I've really come to love this tool, it's a perfect example of unix's idea of do one thing well in a small application.

Each version is more elegant than the last too, which doesn't hurt.

But it's not perfect, it is afterall at 0.2.x, which means the author knows it's not perfect, but it's pretty darned good as far as I'm concerned, it's my first choice of partitioning tools now, and it's become the first recommended choice of distros like kanotix.

That's the livecd however, not the installed program version, which I avoid. And qtparted is far too buggy to be trusted with any disk partitioning at all as far as I'm concerned.

System Rescue CD

Posted May 19, 2006 20:16 UTC (Fri) by h2 (guest, #27965) [Link]

typo: I meant, usually the latest does work, but in the rare cases it doesn't, I go back to the older version to see if it will work. And so far one of these options has worked on almost everything I've tried it on.

System Rescue CD

Posted May 19, 2006 22:31 UTC (Fri) by Ed_L. (guest, #24287) [Link]

"It has however worked fine on all the sata drives I've run it on so far, but that probably will vary motherboard to motherboard, sata chipset to sata chipset."

Well yes, that was (intended to be) part of my orginal point. On my particular mainboard the newer parted's wouldn't, and for whatever reason the older one on Knoppix 4.0.2 would. Your success with Gparted LiveCD on sata drives is a very useful bit of information to me, and thanks. As are your reservations r.e. QtParted. And I agree, one shouldn't expect The World from a 0.2 release. I didn't and don't.

I was also trying to be reasonably generous with Fedora, which I have used (almost) exclusively since its inception, and Red Hat before that.

Thanks for your informative reply.

System Rescue CD

Posted May 20, 2006 12:52 UTC (Sat) by burdicda (guest, #10272) [Link]

Tried the latest 2.5 i think and it would not copy (image) at all....

It just sat there and did nothing when "copy" was clicked...

Have to go back to prev and check it out....

Makes ya wonder...Don't these dev's try before release LOL

System Rescue CD

Posted May 20, 2006 22:57 UTC (Sat) by h2 (guest, #27965) [Link]

burdicda, unfortunately most devs don't have build labs filled with every possible hard drive/mobo combination, so they depend on user feedback to deal with bugs.

Would be great if some way was found to give heavy duty build lab testing to every new version of any major open source application, but I guess for now just having users give good bug reports is as good as we can hope for.

I had the same experience as you though, 0.1 worked on one system when 0.2 did not, but overall the stability and range of supported systems seems to be consistently expanding version to version, though of course bugs will creep in version to version.

have to give a 'thanks' to the gparted livecd guys, good idea, implementation gets better all the time.