TrojanWarBlade
Programmer
Just thought I'd share a note and some ideas here for discussion.
I managed to trash my machine the other day by installing linux on a new blank drive whilst the machine still had important data on it on other drives.
Hindsight is such a wonderful thing!
The machine had 4 drives and was running perfectly. 2 of the drives were on a raid interface and were striped for performance.
I installed a new drive and installed Fedora Core 4.
When I rebooted, FC4 found the raid drives but NOT the raid controller and decided that these drives appeared to have valid (but corrupted) filesystems on them.
Consequently it went straight into fsck and tried to fix the drives.
NICE!
As you can imagine, with only 50% of the data available on each drive it simply mangled them and gave up.
Now I'm left with the enviable task of trying to recover anything I can from the mess.
Neither FC4 or the raid controller appear to be able to anything with the drives so I guess I'm gonna have to learn a little bit about the raid structure and ext2 (old linux, pre-ext3).
Anyway, the hindsight:
Firstly, if installing linux on a drive in a machine that has other drives in that have important data on, DISCONNECT these other drives BEFORE you install.
Secondly, if you make the mistake of leaving them connected, DO NOT BOOT the new installation to anything other than run level 1. Or maybe get a copy of Knoppix.
You will need to edit the /etc/fstab and ensure that you remove the entries for these drives or at least flag them to not be fsck'd. My preference is to remove them completely.
OK, I know what your gonna say, "what about your backups?".
Well when you have hundreds of gigs on a single file system, it become very difficult to backup anything.
I guess the obvious thing here is to consider what is THE most critical data and if it's possible to compress and back that up alone separately. Anything is better than nothing.
OK, well I'm done here (but far from done recovering my system) so I'll leave it to you guys to throw around some ideas and comments.
I hope that someone learns enough from this sorry tale to avoid such a mistake.
BTW: I should have known better. I've been a professional for 20 years now and been using linux for 10 so there are no excuses. I does go to show though that it can happen to any of us. You have been warned!!!
Trojan.
I managed to trash my machine the other day by installing linux on a new blank drive whilst the machine still had important data on it on other drives.
Hindsight is such a wonderful thing!
The machine had 4 drives and was running perfectly. 2 of the drives were on a raid interface and were striped for performance.
I installed a new drive and installed Fedora Core 4.
When I rebooted, FC4 found the raid drives but NOT the raid controller and decided that these drives appeared to have valid (but corrupted) filesystems on them.
Consequently it went straight into fsck and tried to fix the drives.
NICE!
As you can imagine, with only 50% of the data available on each drive it simply mangled them and gave up.
Now I'm left with the enviable task of trying to recover anything I can from the mess.
Neither FC4 or the raid controller appear to be able to anything with the drives so I guess I'm gonna have to learn a little bit about the raid structure and ext2 (old linux, pre-ext3).
Anyway, the hindsight:
Firstly, if installing linux on a drive in a machine that has other drives in that have important data on, DISCONNECT these other drives BEFORE you install.
Secondly, if you make the mistake of leaving them connected, DO NOT BOOT the new installation to anything other than run level 1. Or maybe get a copy of Knoppix.
You will need to edit the /etc/fstab and ensure that you remove the entries for these drives or at least flag them to not be fsck'd. My preference is to remove them completely.
OK, I know what your gonna say, "what about your backups?".
Well when you have hundreds of gigs on a single file system, it become very difficult to backup anything.
I guess the obvious thing here is to consider what is THE most critical data and if it's possible to compress and back that up alone separately. Anything is better than nothing.
OK, well I'm done here (but far from done recovering my system) so I'll leave it to you guys to throw around some ideas and comments.
I hope that someone learns enough from this sorry tale to avoid such a mistake.
BTW: I should have known better. I've been a professional for 20 years now and been using linux for 10 so there are no excuses. I does go to show though that it can happen to any of us. You have been warned!!!
Trojan.