Hi again -- As I'm studying the situation, my plan for how to do this recovery has evolved a bit. What I'm planning now is the following:
1. Install the new hard drives 2. Boot off the rescue CD 3. Use fdisk to set up one of the drives as the system / boot drive, with 3 DOS-style partitions (boot, swap, and everything else) 4. Install grub in the boot partition 5. Recover my backup to the new system disk via restore 6. Update /etc/fstab to match the configuration I set up in (3) and (4), since I'm not setting up the new hard drives exactly the way that the old drive was configured 7. Follow the instructions at http://linuxconfig.org/Linux_Software_Raid_1_Setup to incorporate the system disk and the second disk as a RAID-1 array. If anyone wants to jump in and shout, "No, you fool!" when they see this plan, let me know. Mark -- I've decided against using LVM because (a) it adds another level of complication to the overall recovery / RAID-ification procedure, which at my low level of expertise I really do not need, and (b) it's not clear to me that LVM offers that much benefit for a relatively simple home system with more hard drive capacity than I really need. Maybe on my next system... -PT On Thu, Nov 11, 2010 at 11:01 AM, Peter Tenenbaum < [email protected]> wrote: > Klistvud -- excellent, thanks, that is definitely the way to go! I can see > that the rescue CD from live.debian.net (actually from > cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/squeeze_live_beta1/amd64/iso-hybrid/) contains > everything I need, so I'll use that. > > Now: in the interim, I've decided to take this opportunity to make my > system RAID-1, so that I get an extra level of protection and also so that > if I ever have another drive failure I can limp along on the other drive for > the few days it will take me to get myself organized to recover. Also, I > get to set up a RAID-1 array, which I don't yet know how to do, and learning > is fun. As I understand it, the steps I need to take are: > > 1. Install the new hard drives > 2. Boot off the rescue CD > 3. Use fdisk and mdadm to set up the 2 drives as a RAID-1 array > 4. Use LVM (or fdisk?) to partition the resulting array (boot, linux, and > swap) > 5. Recover my backup to the array via restore command. > > So now, a few new questions: > > 1. Is the list above generally correct? > 2. When I installed Debian back in the summer I let the install script > handle the disk partitioning. This time I have to do it manually. What > size should I use for the boot and swap partitions? > 3. Do I need to manually install and configure grub in order to make the > RAID-1 array the boot disk? Again, this was handled for me by the installer > script the first time around. > 4. What, if anything, do I need to do so that the RAID-1 array is > activated at boot time? > > Whew! Sorry for the huge stack of questions, any and all help, > encouragement, etc, is welcome! > > Thanks in advance, > -PT > > > On Thu, Nov 11, 2010 at 8:16 AM, Peter Tenenbaum < > [email protected]> wrote: > >> Hi everyone -- a few days ago the hard drive in my home Debian system >> started making unhappy noises and refuses to boot. I discussed the >> situation with knowledgeable people and they diagnosed that indeed the hard >> drive had failed and needs replacement. >> >> I have a recent backup of the hard drive which I made using dump, and I >> have a new hard drive on order. My recovery plan is as follows: >> >> 1. Burn a new netinst CD from a recent build (I am running Squeeze, btw) >> 2. Replace the hard drive >> 3. Use the netinst CD to set up the filesystem on the new hard drive >> 4. Recover the backup using restore. >> >> Here's my question: should I allow the netinst CD to install Debian on >> the new hard drive, given that I plan to use restore to restore everything >> and thus would overwrite any new installation? I realize that I can >> probably tune the action of the restore command so that it only restores >> what I need from the backup and doesn't touch a new OS install; but I think >> that the process of making the decisions for what needs to be restored and >> what does not would be complex, time-consuming, and error-prone; so I would >> rather just restore the whole thing. >> >> Any advice you can offer would be welcome. >> >> Thanks in advance, >> -PT >> > >
