Re: Recovery from hard drive failure

[Peter Tenenbaum <peter.g.tenenbaum@gmail.com>]

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 <peter.g.tenenbaum@gmail.com> 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