It's a brick :-<(

[Geoffrey Leach]

I find myself in need of a bootable rescue disk that provides (at least)
disk diagnostics and disk wipe programs. (I have a F36 thumb - I assume
that it has neither)
Referrals would be greatly appreciated.

[Jeffrey Walton]

On Thu, Nov 17, 2022 at 3:09 PM Geoffrey Leach <geoffleach.gl(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:
>  I find myself in need of a bootable rescue disk that provides (at least) disk diagnostics
> and disk wipe programs. (I have a F36 thumb - I assume that it has neither)
>  Referrals would be greatly appreciated. 
I don't think Fedora provides a first class rescue or repair option to
boot to. I think the best you get is the grub command line, and you
have to rescue things manually. (Ubuntu is working on an automatic
rescue or repair option. They may have it by now).

For wiping, I use The Ultimate Boot CD. It does a good job at wiping
to several standards. It can even wipe disks in RAID volumes.
https://www.ultimatebootcd.com/ ,

Jeff

[Joe Zeff]

On 11/17/2022 01:08 PM, Geoffrey Leach wrote:
>  I find myself in need of a bootable rescue disk that provides (at
> least) 
>  disk diagnostics and disk wipe programs. (I have a F36 thumb - I assume 
>  that it has neither)
>  Referrals would be greatly appreciated.
>   
If you have or can get the F36 .iso, try burning it onto a DVD and boot 
from that.

[Go Canes]

On Thu, Nov 17, 2022 at 3:09 PM Geoffrey Leach <geoffleach.gl(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:
>  I find myself in need of a bootable rescue disk that provides (at
> least) disk diagnostics and disk wipe programs. (I have a F36 thumb - I assume that it has
> neither) 
Sometimes I use the "rescue" option from Fedora install media - I
don't know if it has any automated diagnostic tools, but at the very
least it will give you a shell and from there you can use "dd"  to
wipe disks.

[Stephen Morris]

On 18/11/22 07:08, Geoffrey Leach wrote:
>  I find myself in need of a bootable rescue disk that provides (at 
>  least) disk diagnostics and disk wipe programs. (I have a F36 thumb - 
>  I assume that it has neither)
>  Referrals would be greatly appreciated. 
Depending on what level of diagnostics you
want and what you are trying 
to do with disk wiping (are you only wanting to remove specific files or 
remove everything to start again, in which case would re-formatting the 
partition/disk or deleting/re-creating the partition suffice?), if you 
have another pc where you can download and burn a CD/DVD or get the 
program on a flash disk then Gparted may provide what you are looking 
for, which also is in the Fedora repositories. That application will 
expand/contract partitions, create partitions, format partitions, create 
disks as DOS/GPT, and do some rudimentary disk checks. If you have KDE 
there is also KDE Partition Manager in the Fedora repositories which 
does similar things to Gparted, but I prefer to use Gparted as you can 
also get a version that will run in a windows environment. It is also 
possible to get ISO images for Gparted where once burnt to a CD/DVD it 
will boot into Gparted.

regards,
Steve

>  _______________________________________________
>  users mailing list -- users(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
>  To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
>  Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/
>  List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
>  List Archives:
> https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/[e-mail]
>  Do not reply to spam, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/new_issue

[Geoffrey Leach]

Thanks all for the feedback.

Tip of the hat to whoever created the Fedora Live troubleshooting. It has
(at least) gparted, fdisk, fsck, smartctl and badblocks. Seems like that
should be enough for my purposes. (Aside from a hammer :-)

Interestingly, the first three do not find any issues. badblocks froze the
system. smartctl is running, so we'll see

On Thu, Nov 17, 2022 at 2:04 PM Stephen Morris <samorris(a)netspace.net.au&gt;
wrote:

>  On 18/11/22 07:08, Geoffrey Leach wrote:
>  > I find myself in need of a bootable rescue disk that provides (at
>  > least) disk diagnostics and disk wipe programs. (I have a F36 thumb -
>  > I assume that it has neither)
>  > Referrals would be greatly appreciated.
>  Depending on what level of diagnostics you want and what you are trying
>  to do with disk wiping (are you only wanting to remove specific files or
>  remove everything to start again, in which case would re-formatting the
>  partition/disk or deleting/re-creating the partition suffice?), if you
>  have another pc where you can download and burn a CD/DVD or get the
>  program on a flash disk then Gparted may provide what you are looking
>  for, which also is in the Fedora repositories. That application will
>  expand/contract partitions, create partitions, format partitions, create
>  disks as DOS/GPT, and do some rudimentary disk checks. If you have KDE
>  there is also KDE Partition Manager in the Fedora repositories which
>  does similar things to Gparted, but I prefer to use Gparted as you can
>  also get a version that will run in a windows environment. It is also
>  possible to get ISO images for Gparted where once burnt to a CD/DVD it
>  will boot into Gparted.
>
>  regards,
>  Steve
>
>  >
>  > _______________________________________________
>  > users mailing list -- users(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
>  > To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
>  > Fedora Code of Conduct:
>  https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/
>  > List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
>  > List Archives:
>  https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/[e-mail]
>  > Do not reply to spam, report it:
>  https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/new_issue
>  _______________________________________________
>  users mailing list -- users(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
>  To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
>  Fedora Code of Conduct:
>  https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/
>  List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
>  List Archives:
>  https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/[e-mail]
>  Do not reply to spam, report it:
>  https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/new_issue
>

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Geoffrey Leach <geoffleach.gl(a)gmail.com&gt;

| Tip of the hat to whoever created the Fedora Live troubleshooting. It has
| (at least) gparted, fdisk, fsck, smartctl and badblocks. Seems like that
| should be enough for my purposes. (Aside from a hammer :-)
| 
| Interestingly, the first three do not find any issues. badblocks froze the
| system. smartctl is running, so we'll see

I'm not sure that there are any use-cases for badblocks(8) on a modern
disk.  All modern disks want to handle bad blocks themseleves, behind
the scenes.

When a bad block is detected during a write by the disk controller, it
maps the block to another block it takes from a pool of spares.  There
are few ways to observe this:

- one of the S.M.A.R.T. counts goes up

- there may have been an extra bit of latency due to this procedure.

When a bad block is detected during a read by the controller, it
retries in case that works.  If so, it will remap the block on the
assumption that that the original block is no longer reliable.
If retrying fails, the drive reports that failure.

Generally speaking, the correct things to do upon a real disk read
failure is:

- backup your disks in case subsequent steps curdle your data.

- determine what file-system structure just took a bullet.  You might
  have to recover from a backup.  If the hit is to metadata, an fsck(8)
  might be able to fix it.

- after these forensics, write something to the bad block.  The
  controller will automatically remap the block.

[Geoffrey Leach]

Precisely. And it haseverything that I needed.

[Barry]

>  On 20 Nov 2022, at 18:51, D. Hugh Redelmeier <hugh(a)mimosa.com&gt;
> wrote:
>  
>  | From: Geoffrey Leach <geoffleach.gl(a)gmail.com&gt;
>  
>  | Tip of the hat to whoever created the Fedora Live troubleshooting. It has
>  | (at least) gparted, fdisk, fsck, smartctl and badblocks. Seems like that
>  | should be enough for my purposes. (Aside from a hammer :-)
>  | 
>  | Interestingly, the first three do not find any issues. badblocks froze the
>  | system. smartctl is running, so we'll see
>  
>  I'm not sure that there are any use-cases for badblocks(8) on a modern
>  disk.  All modern disks want to handle bad blocks themseleves, behind
>  the scenes.
>  
>  When a bad block is detected during a write by the disk controller, it
>  maps the block to another block it takes from a pool of spares.  There
>  are few ways to observe this:
>  
>  - one of the S.M.A.R.T. counts goes up
>  
>  - there may have been an extra bit of latency due to this procedure.
>  
>  When a bad block is detected during a read by the controller, it
>  retries in case that works.  If so, it will remap the block on the
>  assumption that that the original block is no longer reliable.
>  If retrying fails, the drive reports that failure. 
Mapping of bad blocks only happens on write.
So multiple reads of a bad block will consistently fail.

Barry

>  
>  Generally speaking, the correct things to do upon a real disk read
>  failure is:
>  
>  - backup your disks in case subsequent steps curdle your data.
>  
>  - determine what file-system structure just took a bullet.  You might
>   have to recover from a backup.  If the hit is to metadata, an fsck(8)
>   might be able to fix it.
>  
>  - after these forensics, write something to the bad block.  The
>   controller will automatically remap the block.
>  _______________________________________________
>  users mailing list -- users(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
>  To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
>  Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/
>  List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
>  List Archives:
> https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/[e-mail]
>  Do not reply to spam, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/new_issue

[Michael D. Setzer II]

On 20 Nov 2022 at 22:29, Barry wrote:

From:           	Barry <barry(a)barrys-emacs.org&gt;
Subject:        	Re: It's a brick :-<(
Date sent:      	Sun, 20 Nov 2022 22:29:56 +0000
To:             	"D. Hugh Redelmeier" 
<hugh(a)mimosa.com&gt;,
	Community support for Fedora users 
<users(a)lists.fedoraproject.org&gt;
Send reply to:  	Community support for Fedora 
users <users(a)lists.fedoraproject.org&gt;

>  
>  
>  > On 20 Nov 2022, at 18:51, D. Hugh Redelmeier <hugh(a)mimosa.com&gt; wrote:
>  > 
>  > | From: Geoffrey Leach <geoffleach.gl(a)gmail.com&gt;
>  > 
>  > | Tip of the hat to whoever created the Fedora Live troubleshooting. It has
>  > | (at least) gparted, fdisk, fsck, smartctl and badblocks. Seems like that
>  > | should be enough for my purposes. (Aside from a hammer :-)
>  > | 
>  > | Interestingly, the first three do not find any issues. badblocks froze the
>  > | system. smartctl is running, so we'll see
>  > 
>  > I'm not sure that there are any use-cases for badblocks(8) on a modern
>  > disk.  All modern disks want to handle bad blocks themseleves, behind
>  > the scenes.
>  > 
>  > When a bad block is detected during a write by the disk controller, it
>  > maps the block to another block it takes from a pool of spares.  There
>  > are few ways to observe this:
>  > 
>  > - one of the S.M.A.R.T. counts goes up
>  > 
>  > - there may have been an extra bit of latency due to this procedure.
>  > 
>  > When a bad block is detected during a read by the controller, it
>  > retries in case that works.  If so, it will remap the block on the
>  > assumption that that the original block is no longer reliable.
>  > If retrying fails, the drive reports that failure.
>  
>  Mapping of bad blocks only happens on write.
>  So multiple reads of a bad block will consistently fail.
>   
Not always the case. Going back to the old DOS days, 
believe the OS would try 3 times before giving the 
abort/retry/ignore error message, and sometimes many 
retires would get a good read...

Once had a co-worker that had a critical drive fail, but 
was able to get the critical files she needed. Ran GRC 
Spinrite on the 60G disk, and it took 4 days of running to 
finish. The drive was still very corrupted, but was able to 
mount with Linux and the sub directory with the files 
needed was readable, and copied to another disk, and 
were all good really lucky.

Had another co-worker had a disk that had an obviously 
burned chip on disks controller. Found the exact same 
disk on ebay (used) with matching model number for $20. 
Swapped the board, and the data was 100%, but copied 
everything to a brand new disk.. 

But of course had other disks that were totally bad. Use 
to show students and old Seagate 40M disk that had a full 
head crash. Had a collection of various sized drives to 
show how things had changed from the old 20M Seagate 
drives thru the many years...





>  Barry
>  
>  > 
>  > Generally speaking, the correct things to do upon a real disk read
>  > failure is:
>  > 
>  > - backup your disks in case subsequent steps curdle your data.
>  > 
>  > - determine what file-system structure just took a bullet.  You might
>  >  have to recover from a backup.  If the hit is to metadata, an fsck(8)
>  >  might be able to fix it.
>  > 
>  > - after these forensics, write something to the bad block.  The
>  >  controller will automatically remap the block.
>  > _______________________________________________
>  > users mailing list -- users(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
>  > To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
>  > Fedora Code of Conduct:
> https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/
>  > List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
>  > List Archives:
> https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/[e-mail]
>  > Do not reply to spam, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/new_issue
>  _______________________________________________
>  users mailing list -- users(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
>  To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
>  Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/
>  List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
>  List Archives:
> https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/[e-mail]
>  Do not reply to spam, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/new_issue

+------------------------------------------------------------+
 Michael D. Setzer II - Computer Science Instructor 
(Retired)     
 mailto:[e-mail]                            
 mailto:[e-mail]
 Guam - Where America's Day Begins                        
 G4L Disk Imaging Project maintainer 
 http://sourceforge.net/projects/g4l/
+------------------------------------------------------------+

[Roger Heflin]

In the past I have been able to with a working network dnf install as
needed on any of the livecds.

I have been using one or another livecd as a rescue disk for a long
time and they generally have most tools, and dnf install's work until
you reboot it.

On Thu, Nov 17, 2022 at 2:09 PM Geoffrey Leach <geoffleach.gl(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:
>
> I find myself in need of a bootable rescue disk that provides (at least) disk
diagnostics and disk wipe programs. (I have a F36 thumb - I assume that it has neither)
> Referrals would be greatly appreciated.
> _______________________________________________
> users mailing list -- users(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
> To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
> Fedora Code of Conduct:
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/
> List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
> List Archives:
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/[e-mail]
> Do not reply to spam, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/new_issue

[Tom Horsley]

I used the instructions at:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Multiboot_USB_drive

To make a multi-boot USB stick that holds many different ISO images
and can boot from them off the USB stick. It is very handy and I
have several images like memtest86+ and systemrescuecd as
well as fedora and ubuntu images. It has often come in handy.

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Geoffrey Leach <geoffleach.gl(a)gmail.com&gt;
| 
| I find myself in need of a bootable rescue disk that provides (at least)
| disk diagnostics and disk wipe programs. (I have a F36 thumb - I assume
| that it has neither)

I always use the latest Fedora installation .iso, booted from a USB stick.
I asssume that that is the same as your "F36 thumb".

As you mentioned, it is missing some tools but dnf works so you can 
install any tools you need.  Of course the installation is not persistent.

Two good things about the F36 installation live system:

- you already have it lying around

- you can be sure that it matches your system