Need help recovering my Linux System
I was attempting to tweak a typical Windows/Linux setup and completely trashed the disk. In retrospect, it was a pretty poor setup to begin with. I already have a Windows machine (from which I'm writing this note), so why would I want Windows on my other machine? Simply because I was so new and green when I first set it up that I didn't know any better. Here's what I had - Windows - 40 GB Swap - 1 GB Linux - 39 GB Here's what I have now - Swap - 3 GB Linux - 40 GB Free for the future - 37 GB Now to my dilemma. I had to install a bare minimum system to get the above set up. Now I want to recover my original system which has a fully functional Oracle Enterprise 9.2.0.5.0 on it (yes, I'd sort of like to have that all back). I have the full backup of my old system on a usb disk drive. I have never worked with setting up a usb connection on Linux. This device currently is fully formatted in NTFS. My plan is to re-format it and give half of the space to Windows (NTFS) and the other half to Linux (FAT3). I can then put my full backup on that device and plug it into my Linux machine. I would think this would be a good way to get the data back into my new Linux system. The restore I did contained everything. Hard disk system areas, all mounted devices at that time, etc. In other words, I backed up MY ENTIRE SYSTEM. If I get that USB device on-line, would I be good to go to do a full Linux restore? Thanks and yours truly, Greg Wallace
Greg Wallace wrote:
I was attempting to tweak a typical Windows/Linux setup and completely trashed the disk. In retrospect, it was a pretty poor setup to begin with. I already have a Windows machine (from which I'm writing this note), so why would I want Windows on my other machine? Simply because I was so new and green when I first set it up that I didn't know any better.
Here's what I had -
Windows - 40 GB Swap - 1 GB Linux - 39 GB
Here's what I have now -
Swap - 3 GB Linux - 40 GB Free for the future - 37 GB
Now to my dilemma. I had to install a bare minimum system to get the above set up. Now I want to recover my original system which has a fully functional Oracle Enterprise 9.2.0.5.0 on it (yes, I'd sort of like to have that all back). I have the full backup of my old system on a usb disk drive. I have never worked with setting up a usb connection on Linux. This device currently is fully formatted in NTFS. My plan is to re-format it and give half of the space to Windows (NTFS) and the other half to Linux (FAT3). I can then put my full backup on that device and plug it into my Linux machine. I would think this would be a good way to get the data back into my new Linux system. The restore I did contained everything. Hard disk system areas, all mounted devices at that time, etc. In other words, I backed up MY ENTIRE SYSTEM. If I get that USB device on-line, would I be good to go to do a full Linux restore?
Thanks and yours truly, Greg Wallace
Unfortunately, it will probably not be as easy as copying files over and rebooting. For starters, you have changed the drive layout and will most likely not be able to use the backed up fstab. If partitions have change you may also need to keep your current grub config. You say you have a full backup on a USB disk. You also say the disk is NTFS. I'm going to assume you were not writing to NTFS from Linux and your backups are actually on the other PC. If the files were backed up to tgz or some format that maintained permissions, most of the system could be restored easily. If the files were just copied to the other system ... well ... that's a whole new ballgame. Where exactly are the backup files and what format are they in? Louis
Louis Richards wrote:
Greg Wallace wrote:
I was attempting to tweak a typical Windows/Linux setup and completely trashed the disk. In retrospect, it was a pretty poor setup to begin with. I already have a Windows machine (from which I'm writing this note), so why would I want Windows on my other machine? Simply because I was so new and green when I first set it up that I didn't know any better.
Here's what I had -
Windows - 40 GB Swap - 1 GB Linux - 39 GB
Here's what I have now -
Swap - 3 GB Linux - 40 GB Free for the future - 37 GB
Now to my dilemma. I had to install a bare minimum system to get the above set up. Now I want to recover my original system which has a fully functional Oracle Enterprise 9.2.0.5.0 on it (yes, I'd sort of like to have that all back). I have the full backup of my old system on a usb disk drive. I have never worked with setting up a usb connection on Linux. This device currently is fully formatted in NTFS. My plan is to re-format it and give half of the space to Windows (NTFS) and the other half to Linux (FAT3). I can then put my full backup on that device and plug it into my Linux machine. I would think this would be a good way to get the data back into my new Linux system. The restore I did contained everything. Hard disk system areas, all mounted devices at that time, etc. In other words, I backed up MY ENTIRE SYSTEM. If I get that USB device on-line, would I be good to go to do a full Linux restore?
Thanks and yours truly, Greg Wallace
Unfortunately, it will probably not be as easy as copying files over and rebooting. For starters, you have changed the drive layout and will most likely not be able to use the backed up fstab. If partitions have change you may also need to keep your current grub config.
You say you have a full backup on a USB disk. You als>o say the disk is NTFS. I'm going to assume you were not writing to NTFS from Linux and your backups are actually on the other PC. If the files were backed up to tgz or some format that maintained permissions, most of the system could be restored easily. If the files were just copied to the other system ... well ... that's a whole new ballgame.
Where exactly are the backup files and what format are they in?
Louis
Louis: Originally, I would create backups on my linux system. I then ftp'd them to a Linksys device, which contains a unix system emulating NTFS via SAMBA. It has a SAMBA Share that you can mount directly into your file structure using smbfs and it also has an ftp server that you can connect to and either send or receive data. I originally mounted this drive into my directory structure and backed up directly to it. I did restores from it multiple times and never had a failure. At some point, my backups became so large that I could no longer back up to it directly (buffer overflows on the Linksys), so I started doing the backup to a local directory and then ftping it to this machine, whereby it controlled the flow rate and took the data as it had resources. I could still do a recovery by mounting the shared file and pointing YAST to it directly (no problem with reading, since Linux simply had to take the data as fast as that device could have it ready). Since my new installation doesn't have any of the SAMBA configuration set up, that won't work any longer, unless I want to spend a bunch of time re-configuring that. So I want to simply move the file over from there to this USB enabled device and do a restore from it. I don't believe any conversion was ever done on the data. It is a tar file, which I think means that wherever you put it (NTFS, FAT3), the receiving file structure doesn't try to re-interpret it but simply stores it as received. Without having SAMBA installed, I couldn't address the storage on this guy as is, so I'm partitioning it into a 1/2 NTFS, 1/2 FAT3 format. I will then put the TAR file on the FAT3 partition. I would think I could just mount that into my directory somehow and then grab the data. On both my new and my old system, I have the same single had with data. The number associated with them is also the same. The only difference is that under the old setup there was a Windows partition ahead of both of my swap and my data partition. Now, I've simply eliminated the Windows partition and everything else is adjusted upward on the disk. If you look at the Linux portion by itself, the only thing that's changed is that my old swap was 1 GB and my new one is 3 GB. Yours truly, Greg Wallace
On Thursday 19 August 2004 16:00, Greg Wallace wrote:
My plan is to re-format it and give half of the space to Windows (NTFS) and the other half to Linux (FAT3).
FAT3? What's that? Never heard of it. Did you mean FAT, FAT32, or perhaps even ext3? On the other hand, Linux knows perfectly well how to write to FAT filesystems. So using a FAT filesystem as an exchange point between Windows and Linux would not be a bad idea at all, because both Linux and Windows know how to read and write FAT filesystems. Cheers, Leen
-----Original Message----- From: Leendert Meyer [mailto:leen.meyer@home.nl] Sent: Thursday, August 19, 2004 7:05 AM To: suse-linux-e@suse.com Subject: Re: [SLE] Need help recovering my Linux System On Thursday, August 19, 20004 7:05 AM, Leendert Meyer wrote
On Thursday 19 August 2004 16:00, Greg Wallace wrote:
My plan is to re-format it and give half of the space to Windows (NTFS) and the other half to Linux (FAT3).
FAT3? What's that? Never heard of it. >Did you mean FAT, FAT32, or perhaps
even ext3?
On the other hand, Linux knows perfectly well how to write to FAT filesystems. So using a FAT filesystem as an exchange point between Windows and Linux would not be a bad idea at all, because both Linux and Windows know how to read and write FAT filesystems.
Cheers,
Leen
Good to hear from a familiar voice (so to speak). Yeah, I'm not too familiar with the terminology, but what you say is basically what I have. Assuming I have the full tar backup out on that usb enabled disk on a FAT formatted partition, how hard would it be to just point to it and have YAST do a full recovery? It's the same data that was on my old partition (I only had one partition, so it's one to one). Could I just do a full restore of all packages, data, system areas, etc. and have that partition look just like the one that the backup was built from? Thanks, Greg Wallace
On Thursday 19 August 2004 18:16, Greg Wallace wrote:
Assuming I have the full tar backup out on that usb enabled disk on a FAT formatted partition, how hard would it be to just point to it and have YAST do a full recovery?
*Exactly* how did you create that tar backup? Cheers, Leen
On Thursday, August 19, 2004 at 8:42 AM, Leendert Meyer wrote.
On Thursday 19 August 2004 18:16, Greg Wallace wrote:
Assuming I have the full tar backup out on that usb enabled disk on a FAT formatted partition, how hard would it be to just point to it and have YAST do a full recovery?
*Exactly* how did you create that tar backup?
Cheers,
Leen
Leen: I created a .tar.gz backup directly to my Linux machine and then ftp'd that to a networked storage device I have. Thanks, Greg Wallace
On Friday 20 August 2004 01:09, Greg Wallace wrote:
On Thursday, August 19, 2004 at 8:42 AM, Leendert Meyer wrote.
On Thursday 19 August 2004 18:16, Greg Wallace wrote:
Assuming I have the full tar backup out on that usb enabled disk on a FAT formatted partition, how hard would it be to just point to it and have
YAST
do a full recovery?
*Exactly* how did you create that tar backup?
Let me put this differently: if you created a tarball with the option 'c',
then you can unpack it with the option 'x', e.g. 'tar xfz
Leen:
I created a .tar.gz backup directly to my Linux machine and then ftp'd that to a networked storage device I have.
Cheers, Leen
participants (3)
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Greg Wallace
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Leendert Meyer
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Louis Richards