Thursday, December 27, 2007
That Was So Not Fun, Part II
Well, after more than 5 hours of speeding down I-20 to get home, I greeted my cats, partially unloaded my car, sat down at my desk, and lo and behold, the screen was locked up on my rebuilt workstation last night. Rebooted it and uh-oh!, it can't find the boot sector on the hard drive. Pop in the Maxtor diagnostic floppy I made last week and worse news, the drive gave a failure code. Ran over to CompUSA today to grab a drive on sale (hah!) because they were going out of business. Slaved the new drive, boot up with a Live CD, fdisk the new drive, then mkswap /dev/sda1 ; mkfs -t ext3 /dev/sda2 ; mkfs -ext3 /dev/sda3 , then mount the new partitions under /media - mount -rw /dev/hdb2 /media/hdb2 ; mount -rw /dev/hdb3 /media/hdb3, then rsync -a /media/hda2/ /media/hdb2/ and rsync -a /media/hda3 /media/hdb3/ (two hours to copy everything from this partition), and I think I'm almost done. I just have to replace the old drive with the new drive after changing the jumper from slave to master on the new drive, then boot up with the Live CD, mount -rw /dev/hda2 /media/hda2 ; chroot /media/hda2 ; grub-install /dev/hda to reinstall the MBR. Not so fast! I get an interesting error - "/dev/hda does not have any corresponding BIOS drive", when I used either /sbin/grub-install or /usr/sbin/grub-install. I found an interesting RedHat knowledgebase article that was kind of helpful. I sort of stumbled on the fix by accident. While in the chroot environment, you have to type grub to go into the grub command shell, then type root (hd0,1) (note:hd0,1 means first drive, second partition for the root partition), followed by setup (hd0) to write to the MBR. Then you need to find the UUIDs of the new drive's partitions (swap, sda2, and sda3). That's right, I should have used the Sidux Live CD instead of a Kanotix Live CD. Once you have the new UUIDs in hand using "udevinfo -q env -n /dev/sda1", etc., edit /boot/grub/menu.lst and /etc/fstab to reflect the new UUIDs. You only need the root partition's UUID for the menu.lst, but you'll need all of your UUIDs for /etc/fstab. Shut the system off, take the Live CD out and she should boot into your recovered system. Only took me an additional 2 hours to stumble upon the solution. Total time to migrate my data to a new drive and make it bootable was 5 hours (almost 3 hours to migrate, and 2 hours to make bootable). I probably can get it down to 3.5 hours now.
Labels: data recovery rsync grub udevinfo
Comments:
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Pete,
I lose a bit more memory every year.:) That's one reason I wrote it down in the blog. That, and the fact I haven't seen a write-up on making a new drive bootable with Linux.
John
I lose a bit more memory every year.:) That's one reason I wrote it down in the blog. That, and the fact I haven't seen a write-up on making a new drive bootable with Linux.
John
no real comment, but crap, you could easily do ancient hebrew, you could probably see it, but man, it don't pay cash, so why bother, also ego-incentives are in short supply these days, but, truly, you could do it.
I knew over a year ago that AJ could do it, the agility of mind and the power to hold concepts for long drawn out periods while galivanting over hill and dale, sumersaulting over obstacles, I have seen her work, super, looks like you are likewise, difference is the content, wonder why?
I knew over a year ago that AJ could do it, the agility of mind and the power to hold concepts for long drawn out periods while galivanting over hill and dale, sumersaulting over obstacles, I have seen her work, super, looks like you are likewise, difference is the content, wonder why?
The Buddhist or Tolle answer is that AJ and I (actually every living thing) is Universal Consciousness expressing itself as form. Our perspectives, personalities, and experiencees are different, and this is the reason why Universal Consciousness goes to the trouble of creating and making a changing World full of living Beings - for the sheer FUN and EN-JOY-MENT of it, Jim! How dull to have a static, never changing, Universe!
Besides, Julie is a trained architect/artist. I am trained as a scientist/observer. You are an artist by training. The aspect all our professions or former professions have in common is passion and observation - the art of observing actuality passionately. AJ expresses concepts in her unique mystical way. I express mystical experiences in more formal psychological or scientific terms, unless there is no way to label the experience with a word or thought. I have found that if you look closely, the mystics and the scientists often say the same things using different terms for the same process or concept. Same goes for the different religions.
However, more profoundly, there are only two things one needs to do to find "God" (whatever that word or concept means) - be in the present and be detached from the conventional human viewpoint of what the "World" is or is not, be detached from the Collective Human Dream.
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Besides, Julie is a trained architect/artist. I am trained as a scientist/observer. You are an artist by training. The aspect all our professions or former professions have in common is passion and observation - the art of observing actuality passionately. AJ expresses concepts in her unique mystical way. I express mystical experiences in more formal psychological or scientific terms, unless there is no way to label the experience with a word or thought. I have found that if you look closely, the mystics and the scientists often say the same things using different terms for the same process or concept. Same goes for the different religions.
However, more profoundly, there are only two things one needs to do to find "God" (whatever that word or concept means) - be in the present and be detached from the conventional human viewpoint of what the "World" is or is not, be detached from the Collective Human Dream.
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