Minor disaster recovery

Tyson Sawyer tyson at j3.org
Wed Aug 12 08:16:54 EDT 2009


Its been at least 10 years since I have actually done a recovery of
this sort. ...back then LILO was king and floppy drives were still in
use.  I've been lucky enough to not do much sysadmin work in recent
years.

So...

I have a small home server running a not quite up to date version of
Ubuntu 8.10.  It has an 80G main drive that is the OS and
applications.  It has an external USB drive that is our primary data
storage.  It has a 2nd USB drive that is used to backup the rest of
the system, a couple of laptops and an N810.  We use BackupPC for the
backups and occasionally check that it is working and have
occasionally recovered a single file.

The primary drive has gone on the blink.  About 4-5 days ago the
primary system drive reported some sort of complaint and the OS
remounted it read-only.  We rebooted, said, "Damn, well we'll have to
replace that" and went about life.  This morning we found the system
mostly unresponsive.  The caps-lock LED was about the only response we
could get out of it.

The filesystem on the system drive is (or should be) backed up.  We
would like to recover the system rather than rebuild to avoid having
to figure out all the applications we had installed and figure out how
we had them configured.  There is a reasonable chance that we can
reboot the old drive again, but I have not yet tried.

We will attempt to find a replacement drive today.  We live in
Brookline, NH and work in Bedford, MA.  Any suggestions on stores or
drive brands?

Any suggestions on recovery strategy?  One strategy I had in mind is
(if the old drive still runs) is to boot the old drive with the new as
a secondary.  Shut down all extra services.  Partition and format the
new drive.  Copy the filesystem from the old to the new.  Install Grub
on the new (dont' know how, never done much with Grub) and boot it.
Do some sort of restore from BackupPC to restore any libraries for
files that have been corrupted.

Other suggestions?  ...or fill in the details (specifically the
install of Grub and moving to the primary position) of what I have
outlined?

Oh, the drive is a standard sized IDE.

Thanks!
Ty

-- 
Tyson D Sawyer

A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent
of many bad measures.   - Daniel Webster


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