D&C GLug - Home Page

[ Date Index ] [ Thread Index ] [ <= Previous by date / thread ] [ Next by date / thread => ]

Re: [LUG] grub error 25

 

On 14/12/11 09:35, Tony Sumner wrote:
> RESULT!! and thanks to everyone who helped. I can now mine the
> partition and copy files to the new Debian system, which is of course
> an ext3 fs. 
>
> Tony

Glad it all worked out Tony - you could have manually controlled the
missing loopback devices with losetup but kpartx should have done that
for you automatically. That's partly my fault, because I forgot to ask
you to make sure you had multipath-tools and dmsetup installed as well
(which as you didn't have LVM2 installed initially, you probably
didn't). Also, I note you've played it safe with ext3 but ext4 really is
production ready these days - you can do an in-place upgrade if
necessary. Just stay away from reiserfs from now on :)

You can also specify offsets in the original dd image file by bytes x
sector and mount partitions from within it but you figured it out
anyway: the important thing is you got your files back. Don't forget to
check your recovered /var/log/* for clues as to why it went down (hint:
"grep -i ata /var/log/dmesg*") and after you've nuked the failed disk
make very, *very* sure it's ok before ever trusting it with data again.
Personally I'd chuck it away after taking the magnets out for my fridge
door.

Moral of the story: when disks go bad, always immediately attempt to
completely image them and work from the backup. Running
smartctl/badblocks/RAID rebuilds or anything that isn't dd is just
asking for trouble.

Cheers,

Mat

-- 
The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG
http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list
FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq