[wellylug] Help needed.

[Brent Wood]

I had a similar issue recently on a ship working off Oman.

I actually needed a replica server built, with a 500Gb drive, as the backup
server had a corrupted filesystem (from sitting in a container with ambient
temp inside somewhere over 70C for a few weeks, the outside temp in the shade
was only up to mid 40s)

I finished up booting each system off a PCLOS livecd, setting up disk mounting
& network to do what I needed, then ran dd as Jethro suggests, but through ssh
over the LAN. Some 16hrs later I had a complete working replica, now running
(with some services disabled & a different IP address) concurrently, & being
synchronised via rsync every hour. The liveCD boot simply guarantees that
nothing on the source box is being written to or changed during the process. 

This is one change to the instructions I recommend you make, to ensure the dd
copy is a genuine 100% copy. That is to boot from a LiveCD, mount the disks'
filesystems & then dd them as per Jethro's instructions. Hopefully not
necessary, but it is simple enough to do & safer. 

This approach is robust & worked well. I found that Ubuntu liveCD's did NOT had
sshd available as part of this exercise. Sigh.... went through a few magazine
disks to find the PCLOS iso which worked :-) Try doing that at sea with no
internet access & commercial software!


Cheers,

  Brent Wood

--- Jethro Carr <jethro.carr at jethrocarr.com> wrote:

> On Fri, 2008-03-28 at 23:01 +1300, David Chord wrote:
> > > I would recommend you borrow or buy another disk of similar size and
> > > 'dd' all the information from your broken system over to the backup,
> > > BEFORE you attempt to repair anything. Seriously.
> > 
> > Agreed. I just need to find a spare 80g disk now..  Maybe I need to buy
> one.
> > 
> > How exactly does it have to match? I could quickly get my hands on a 120G 
> > drive, but that's 40G larger.. 
> 
> Any disk will do, as long as it is the same size or larger.
> 
> 
> > I'm kinda nervous about using the dd command as well.. Why do you think I 
> > needed to shell out for expensive recovery software in the first place? :)
> 
> Just check your input - dd will only ever do what you tell it to, and is
> very simple.
> 
> dd if=INPUTDEVICE of=OUTPUTDEVICE