Two posts in one day!

So two posts on a single day... that's a first!

well for me anyway!

It is amazing how many people you meet in IT who seem to forget that the business of IT is business. It is even more amazing how many businesses seem to forget that IT is the business.

Not understanding me?

Well look at a typical organisation (Sorry my American friends, English English spellings...).

Find out how the IT Structure is set up. You will find that in most organisations IT reports into the Finance function of the organisation.

So when you see this you wonder why is that as IT as a function is separate just as HR or Finance is.

Then when you see things you realise that Business considers IT an cost to the business rather than a cost reduction center.

The reason for living for IT is that it enables the business to function at its most optimum and tries to ensure that the business can function and operate in a complicated environment of rules and regulations across borders.

If modern day computer systems were not maintained and the IT organisation not empowered to act independently what you end up with is that the people best placed to look at things and identify issues are effectively shackled from what is a duty to report and enable the business to operate in.

The problem is in dispelling this myth as this has become quite entrenched due to how the IT industry began.

It had initially begun as a function to finance however over time it has grown much more beyond its original scope to the point now that it attracts talent from a varied disciplines and skill sets.

Organisations are now beginning to recognise this and so are IT decision makers to the point now that you are starting to see IT to be a business function in it's own right and move beyond it being considered as a pure cost.

I am a Windows Admin and I am scared of Linux! Part Deux!

Ok so the title is a bit of a homage to the Hot Shots series of films but seriously as a windows admin you are wondering how do I copy that data from say a damaged partition to say and external USB device like a hard disk.

So remember how we mounted the damaged partition using

ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 /mnt/myrecovery

Well same thing here you need to create a folder to mount your external hard drive to.

So for example I am going to create a directory called external

mkdir /mnt/external

and I am now going to mount my external hard drive to it.

ntfs-3g /dev/sdb1 /mnt/external

So now hoping all goes well you should now have your external hard drive mounted.

So lets begin by copying the entire contents of your failed hard disk.

first lets create a new directory on the external hard drive as say i have some important data on there I dont want to mix. I am going to create a folder called recovery.

mkdir /mnt/external/recovery

So now that I have this set up, I am now going to copy my entire partition to this new folder.

so first I am going to switch to the damaged partition we mounted called myrecovery.

cd /mnt/myrecovery

Once you have switched to here just need to copy the data off to the external hard drive.

cp -Rvf * /mnt/external/recovery

The options -Rvf means

v - verbose show information while copying
f - force and dont prompt
R - copy recursively (similar to the windows xcopy /E option)

rather than using *.* we are using the Linux * wild card which will cover everything including links.

If all everything goes well you should now have copied all your data successfully without any major hiccups.

Well done Windows Admin! You have navigated your way through the Linux command line.

Oh if you are wondering how to come out of the linux system just type in reboot when done and don't forget to take the cd out when booting up. You can then check the hard disk and do what ever is required to restore the data.

To Linux Admins ok... so you knew how to do this already but windows is still very easy to work with.