On Mon, 2005-04-18 at 18:11 +1000, Mike Dewhirst wrote:
Greg Wallace wrote:
I need to protect my system from a hard-drive failure. It's on a
Dell
Optiplex desktop machine with a single hard drive. This Dell only allows me to boot from the single internal disk.
If the hard drive fails then you are up a gum tree. You need a BIOS revision which permits booting from floppy or CD or USB drive.
If you can do that maybe you can install SuSE on one of the USB drives even if you have to bootstrap from minimum system on floppy or CD and wait for the USB drive to be recognised?
I have 2 USB 2.0 ports and two USB
hard drives with 120G each of storage on them, all available for backups. I am using app 16G in total on my 80G internal drive, so storage isn't an issue. I am currently running 8.1 Pro, my original SuSE version. It would seem to me that the only way to get my system back would be to replace
On Monday, April 18, 2005 @4:17 AM, Ken Schneider wrote: the
failed drive in the machine,
If my sole drive failed, would I replace it or replace the machine and start again?
I believe the only way to answer that question is with a screwdriver. Remove the drive before it fails and spend an hour or so contemplating the way forward. You are looking at a boat-anchor if you can't quickly recover - not your system but - your productivity.
You might spend days trying to get a Dell Opti.. to jump through clever booting hoops when it could be quicker and less expensive to ...
1. buy another machine 2. run them in parallel 3. gradually get one machine totally up-to-date - OS and apps 4. switch daily operations across to that machine 5. update the original machine, aggressively if you like 6. use one or other machine as a local backup for the other (note, you would still use USB drives for off-site backup) 7. every now and then unplug your operational machine and see if you
Since it sounds like you have -no- support contract with Oracle why not buy a one-two hour support session? If this machine is so critical to your operation you should have support anyway. Buy a tape drive and purchase some software like BackupEdge for backup/recovery (works excellent by the way for disaster recovery). Putting this off because you are afraid you won't get the right configuration on a new machine is not good and poor planning. What happens when the machine/hard drive dies without a backup? Then you are truly screwed without hope of -any- recovery possible. The last place I worked the company didn't want to purchase support till I told them no support no guaranteed recovery. I also asked them how much down time was worth, hundreds of employees not being able to work because one machine was out of commission. They finally say the light that support was cheaper than downtime.
-- Ken Schneider UNIX since 1989, linux since 1994, SuSE since 1998
"The day Microsoft makes something that doesn't suck is probably the day they start making vacuum cleaners." -Ernst Jan Plugge
Ken: From Oracle, I have 1) a "Personal Edition" support license at $80 per/year, 2) "Software Updates" @ $60 per year, and 3) Product Support for $28/year. I had never worked in Oracle until I installed this software myself using only their Installation Guide, so I was as green as you could be. With a "Personal Edition" license, your support is minimal. You can post questions for their support people, but you often end up figuring out your problem before they do. There were a couple of times in my early going where they really saved my bacon, but those problems came due to buggy Linux Installation CDs, which there was no way I could figure out myself. The next level of support, that gives you the ability to get on-line support, costs about $25,000 / year! Since I'm using this software strictly for certification training (no commercial use allowed), I am allowed to use this cheapo license, but you get what you pay for. I took a quick glance at BackupEdge. Looks similar to G4U. Not sure if it allows backup directly to a USB connected drive as G4U supposedly does. I'll take a closer look at it here shortly. I don't have a network server. I use a router to connect my 2 machines (ones a Windoze). So, I need to be able to back up to a connected hardware device (right?). Thanks, Greg W