I've been running a small personal server for my own needs for a couple of years on an old computer that I got for 2 chocolate bars from a friend.
I installed xubuntu since the machine was old enough not to support ubuntu server distro. It was fine, though, since I mostly used to test my own web projects before I put them in production.
Last week, I couldn't load my web site and when I grabbed the server box and hooked it up to a monitor after a restart all it said is that it printed out terminal not found
and had reverted to busybox.
I did not panick, burned a copy of Damn Small Linux on a CD, tried to run it as a liveCD but failed with kernel panic; vfs unable to mount root fs
, I then attempted to run an xubuntu liveCD but it failed with an "I/O Error reading CD" error.
Since I have a IDE to usb cable, I booted up the same xubuntu on my windows7 machine, connected the HDD through USB and it then recognized the HDD. Some progress, but, sadly, it was not able to mount it. It basically shows the drive icon on the desktop as it recognizes it but when I try to mount it an error pops up that it can't do it. fdisk -l
shows only my internal HDD.
I am out of ideas on this one, so I'm turning to you guys - what are my chances? What else could I try? Will add any information requested ASAP since I know my error message descriptions are vague (typing them from the top of my head, sorry).
All I need to do is get the image of the servers HDD really, I have a spare one to replace it.
Thank you for your time.
Edit
I have just mounted the servers HDD to my win7 machine and it works great. Two questions remain:
- If I make an image and try to restore it on another drive - is that even possible due to it being a different drive (hardware being different) or that doesn't affect anything?
- If I succeed to restore the drive image, I reckon that the problem with the OS not being able to boot will still persist?