I’m a computer and open source enthusiast from Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • Actually grub 0.x series had much more useful rescue shell tab completion than the latest release. You could easily list all boot devices, partitions, and even filesystems and their contents. All from the rescue shell. Consequently, you could boot into Linux and reinstall grub in the MBR to fix it. All that without using a boot CD/USB! Good luck doing that with the latest version of grub and UEFI.

    Also getting into the BIOS on legacy firmware was also very simple. On most machines it’s the three finger salute followed by either F1, Delete or rarely F11 or F12.

    The boot process was simple, and the BIOS had just one simple task: load and execute the first 512 bytes of the disk that was designated as the boot device. That’s it.




  • Assuming you were using a Linux software RAID, you should be able to recover it.

    The first step would be to determine what kind of RAID you were using… btrfs, zfs, mdraid/dmraid/lvm… do you know what kind you set up?

    To start the process, try reconnecting your RAID disks to a working Linux machine, then try checking:

    1. The sudo lsblk command will help you get a list of all connected disks, sizes and partitions.
    2. The partition tables on the disks, eg: sudo fdisk -l /dev/sda (that’s a lowercase L and /dev/sda is your disk)
    3. Assuming you use a standard Linux software RAID, try sudo mdadm --examine /dev/sda1. If all goes well, the last command should give you an idea of what state the disk is in, what RAID level you had, etc.
    4. Next, I would try and see if mdadm can figure out how to reassemble the array, so try sudo mdadm --examine --scan. That should hopefully produce output with the name of the RAID array block device (eg, /dev/md0), RAID level and members of the RAID array (number of disks). Let me know what you discover…

    Note: if you used zfs of btrfs, do not do steps 3 and 4; they are MD RAID specific.