Re: The Small Company's Guide to Hard Drive Failure and Linux

[Paul Wouters <paul () xtdnet nl>]

On Thu, 18 Nov 2004, Dave Aitel wrote:

> tar cf - . | (cd ../hdd1; tar xf -)

I'd add the -p to the extraction myself. I believe it better handles sockets
and named pipes.

> The next step is to re-lilo (or grub) your hd. (hahaha, that sentance made no 
> sense, but bear with me here). Anyways, you want to use the lilo on your hd, 
> not the lilo that comes with knoppix, which doesn't seem to work. The trick 
> to this is to use lilo -r /mnt/hda1 (your root partition, which has /etc/ and

I personally prefer grub, it has a nice 'fallback' image mode so if your new
kernel doesnt boot (and ofcourse you used the panic= kernel option so it will
reboot again) it will fall back to the old known working 'fallback' kernel.
The only problem i have with grub is fast serial ports, but I can deal with 19k2
if I have to.

> /boot/ on it.). However, this won't work with knoppix, since the default 
> mount points have the "nodev" option set. You'll need to remount them with 
> the dev option set before you can run lilo on them.

chroot /your/mount
mount -a (this uses your own fstab so it mounts /boot if needed)
lilo -v

> One thing my lilo did that was weird was rewrite the fstab to use "LABEL=/" 
> instead of /dev/hda1. If you happen to be hosted at Pilosoft (or another

It's not weird. It's a partition label. You can query/set the partition label
with tune2fs -L. The advantadge of labels is that you can re-order your drives
and mount will still properly mount the partitions as / boot /usr etc, since
that's in the label now. It doesnt matter if your IDE drive moved from hda to
hdc or sda. Ofcourse, some hatty distributions decided that some code to read
these labels by the kernel (I believe jbd.o) has been put on the initrd ramdisk,
so if you boot a kernel without making an initrd and using a redhat config, it
wont be able to parse the label and it wont be able to mount the rootfs.

> It's not uncommon for a linux machine not to work properly when you reboot.

Some people have violantly discussed with Ted Tso and asked him "how many people
in the world can safely answer "no I will fix manually" when e2fsck comes up with
an unexpected inconsistency"? But Ted still refuses to see that point, and most
distro's still don't append "-y" to the e2fsck, causing many colocated boxes
to hang useless in single user mode after a year uptime. Always hack the initscripts
or sysconfig/ fsck options and add -y. It will save you a ride sooner or later.

Paul
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