2007-Nov-27

About a week ago, my main NetBSD system -- an old GQ laptop -- died. I read online that they are known to overheat and melt parts. Later I may take it apart to find if I can solder to fix.

My backups were several weeks old so I was missing lots of important data. I tried the 2.5" drive in another laptop but it had a power problem so I couldn't keep the battery charged or live when plugged in. An older laptop was too old to work with the newer EIDE disk. Heather's compaq can boot it, but due to problem in NetBSD when using a kernel with vesa the boot config (boot -c) doesn't work. I have to use that boot -c since my kernel doesn't work with the acpi on that other system.

So my wife picked up a small 2.5 drive enclosure powered by USB from Radio Shack for $24.99.

I booted a system with Zafer's "jibbed" live CD based on NetBSD HEAD with XFree86. And ran "startx". It was openbox so I waited for a long time realizing nothing else was going to appear after the wallpaper. (Right click to get menu.) I plugged in the USB for the 2.5" disk and it was detected fine. And I was able to run disklabel to see what my devices were and I mounted my data. I also mounted a ext2fs disk to do an rsync to update my backups. (I used mbrlabel to see the Linux partitions.)