On Fri, Jun 25, 2004 at 09:44:25AM -0700, Aviram Carmi wrote:
One of the disks in my RHEL 3 system (IBM 36GB 15K RPM SCSI) died,
Sense code 40h?
I'm a sucker for punishment so I'll take on pieces of this puzzle...
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?
The partition information is in the last 64 bytes of the first 512 byte
block. If you never backed it up, and you never wrote it down, and your
drive is totally dead, so are you. You could, of course, ship your
drive to a recovery company but that will cost big $.
In the future, in your backup script, do an fdisk -l to a file that it's
in your backup set somewhere.
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.
In your backup set, you've got /etc/fstab which will tell you where the
partitions where mounted.
How do I format/partition the new disk without an OS?
Both disk 1 into recovery mode. It will mount (or attempt to) your old
disk in /mnt/sysimage and you'll have enough tools present to format and
partition the new drive, dd if possible to get the partition information
back (if you can dd the first 1K you're in business).
How do I restore from the tape, without an OS or a backup client?
You've got an OS on the first disk in rescue mode. You can bring the
network up and you can read the CD. Whether you can install your backup
client I don't know.
do I install RHEL from scratch, install Retrospect client and then restore?
You might find it faster to grab a spare disk, install a fresh minimal
RHEL environment, install the client, and then do the restore to the
good disk. Then install install grub on the good disk and go from
there. A 2gb or 4gb drive is probably enough to install rhel on for
recovery purposes.
however, the restoration will overwrite the running system, is this
going to be a problem?
That's why ideally it should be an extra disk.
I don't know anything about Retrospect so you're on your own there for
Retrospect-specific stuff. Restore the entire volume if you can though,
or at least entire mount points.
--
Ed Wilts, RHCE
Mounds View, MN, USA
mailto:ewilts ewilts org
Member #1, Red Hat Community Ambassador Program
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