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MichaelDavidCrawford [soggy.jobs] writes:

Hiren's Boot CD [hirensbootcd.org] comes with an ISO that I wrote to a stick with dd:

$ sudo dd if=Hiren\'s.BootCD.15.2.iso of=/dev/disk1 bs=4096

(for various values of of=$DEVICE. The above command line comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.)

But that ISO doesn't include a boot loader. Hiren's instructions explain how to install GNU Grub with a Windows utility, but I'm using a Mac to create a Linux rescue stick so I can recover the data from my failing Windows laptop [soylentnews.org].

(My family never discusses religion at the dinner table.)

If I pray to Google most of the hits ask how to install GRUB on a Mac, not how to use a Mac to install Grub on a non-Mac storage device.

I'm running High Sierra but I also have El Capitan installed; I could install older systems if I needed to.

And yes: either my NTFS filesystem is profoundly corrupt or the drive hardware is failing. Today three dozen of my home directory's subdirectory quite suddenly and completely out of nowhere vanished in puffs of smoke.

I'm good about backing up important data but I generally don't back up my w4r3z because there's so much of it. Real Soon Now I'll have the wherewithal to acquire enough storage to make full backups, but as Dave Johnson [seeingtheforest.com] says, "When you say to yourself 'I should do a backup soon' a certain clock starts ticking."

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