Help, Dead Drive

[Aviram Carmi <avi otn com>]

Hi all,

One of the disks in my RHEL 3 system (IBM 36GB 15K RPM SCSI) died, 
Sense code 40h?

I do have daily tape backups on VXA tape using Retrospect (I used 
Retrospect as the back up program, since most of my machines are 
MacOS 9), however, I never had to restore an entire disk. only few 
files here and there...

I cannot boot up the system and the backup client (Retrospect) of 
course is also not available.

I do have two other disks in the system, though I do not recall 
exactly which file systems are mounted there... I think one was 
dedicated to /tmp, but I am not sure...

I also do not recall the partitioning of the dead one, which if I 
recall correctly was quite involved, with some non-standard 
partitions such as (/u /u1 /u2)

is there any way to recover the partitioning?

I can sort of guess by looking at the backup set, but this will only 
give me the partitions names, not all their sizes, were they were 
mounted, nor all the hard links I had going on. for example, I think 
I had /var/www hard linked to /u1/var/www.


I do have an identical disk as a spare (was not intended to be a 
spare, I just never installed it in another system... lucky me)

How do I format/partition the new disk without an OS?

How do I restore from the tape, without an OS or a backup client?

do I install RHEL from scratch, install Retrospect client and then restore?


however, the restoration will overwrite the running system, is this 
going to be a problem?

Retrospect can either restore a whole volume, or individual files, 
however, restored individual files are not restore to where they were 
originally, but to a directory called "backupset-day" at the top 
level of the volume/partition to which I restored to which might not 
necessarily the same volume/partition as the one that was backed up, 
i.e. I can restore /var to /tmp and it will create 
/tmp/backupset/var/ keeping the directory structure (though I am not 
sure about links both soft and hard, which I had quite a bit of in an 
attempt to separate the OS from my file, so if I need to do a clean 
OS upgrade, I will not lose my files).  However, as a fool, I did not 
keep any record of this scheme...

Are there any program that will let me automatically move the 
restored files back from the backup set restored location to their 
original place depending on modified date (will save lots of copying 
of files that were freshly installed, and overwriting running program 
such as the OS/Drivers/Deamons etc)

Bottom line, I have no clue as how to proceed....

Thanks in advance,

-avi


--

Aviram Carmi
Owner
Executive Vice President, Technology

Over TheNet (R)
601 Daily Drive Suite #226
Camarillo, CA 93010-5840

http://www.otn.com/   Building Profitable Web Sites Today
(805) 384-1144 Voice  (805) 384-9111 FAX

(C) Copyright 2004, Over TheNet (R)  All rights reserved.