System Recovery

[Bruce Labitt]

Comments scattered below.
Frank DiPrete wrote:
> It appears that /dev/sda is an 80G IDE drive(?) and /dev/sdb is a 300G 
> SATA drive. 
/dev/sda is also a SATA drive as is the DVD drive.
> Unfortunately having IDE drives go completely fubar even 
> when they still have that 'new drive smell' is completely normal these 
> days. I send love notes to seagate in the form of rma's frequently.
>
> cd rescue mode is loading drive controllers (the pix driver is for the 
> sata drive and possibly the ide drive depending on the chipset) but it's 
> probably not the root cause of the problem.
>
> there is a prompt during rescue boot to try and detect partitions and 
> mount them on /mnt/sysimage. Is this when the system reboots itself?
>   
Never gets that far.  It looks like rescue dies before it can do anything.
> To narrow this down, disconnect the failed drive /dev/sda and boot the 
> rescue cd again. if it does not reboot itself, theres the problem.
>   
I'll try it.  I think I actually did this and it made no difference.  I 
have burned a CD set and try the experiment again.  It has been a tough 
day...
> Second test is to reconnect the drive, boot in rescue mode, but *do not* 
> try and detect the partitions and mount them on /mnt/sysimage
>
> If this fails too, then the drive is really fubar.
>
> If this is the case then there is little point in trying to get your 
> root (/) partition info off this disk.
>
> However if you are able to boot the rescue environment without mounting 
> the partitions there may be some hope. lvm complicates matters somewhat.
>
> If you can boot it into rescue mode with the drive attached but *not 
> mounted* you can try:
>
> pvscan
> vgscan
> lvchange -ay
> lvscan
>
> then try to fsck that root partition on lvm
> fsck /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00
>
> btw - k3b may use temp space on var by default to stage and create its 
> iso image. (I'd have to check) so it may have done nothing wrong but try 
> to write to a crappy drive.
>
> On a side note, I know that fedora/rh uses lvm for everything as the 
> default install, but I stopped using lvm for the /(root) partition 
> because it make recovery more difficult.
>
>