hard drive access
This past Saturday my main workstation at home quit on me. Unfortunately this
happened while I was away for the day. When I arrived home the system was
beeping (a continuous cycle of 1 second beep followed by 4 seconds of silence).
Originally, I thought it was a failed power supply. Antec tech support
disagreed with me and referred me to the motherboard manufacturer (Biostar).
Their tech support said that the beep code indicated either a dead CPU or a
corrupted BIOS. After I explained that removing the RAM, CPU and video card
resulted in exactly the same beeping, the tech said he was reasonably certain
it was the BIOS. So, to make a long story short, they are sending me a new
BIOS chip to install.
However, there is no guarantee that the new BIOS will fix the problem, leaving
with the possibility of getting a new mother board. The problem I have is that
though my system performs regular backups (every morning @ 0200) to my file
server, there are some important things I did Saturday morning to which I need
access and if I end up needing a new motherboard, it could be anohter week or
two before it is back up and running. The real problem is that my system has
two hard drives in RAID1 (software) with LVM on top of that. The question is:
How do I safely access the data?
The LVM HOWTO has a recipe for moving a volume from one system to another, but I
can't perform the prep steps since my main system is not bootable.
Unfortunately, I don't have a spare motherboard laying around that I can use
either. I know that the RAID part is not so big a deal, since it will happily
rebuild a "dirty" part of the array. However, I am clueless as to how I might
get access to the LVM volumes. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
-Roberto
--
Roberto C. Sanchez
http://familiasanchez.net/~roberto
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