Shredder

[t00fri]

Sorry for my hiding. Two days ago, the Reiser file system of my (Linux) desktop machine appeared to be totally shreddered, presumably due to a (short) failure of my rather senior harddisk.

After buying a new 250 GB hd with hyperfast SATAII interface, ordering a Promise SATAII controller and after a lot of file system rescue work, I am now in the process of reinstalling a new OpenSuse 10.3 Linux system onto the new disk. Also, my dual boot Windows partitions had to be imaged to the new harddisk.

It's a complicated logistic challenge as long as my Promise controller has not arrived. So I always must choose among only two of my harddisks and the SATA CDwriter being plugged in. The CD writer I need for installation work, while the two harddisks I need for rescuing what was left over. After running the available reiser rescue software, there were 11000 "homeless" files(!) in the "lost & found" directory ...

I guess I will be busy throughout the weekend

Bye Fridger

[ElChristou]

Indeed it's incredible the number of files and junk one can find in the corners of these HDs...

[LordFerret]

Ouch! No fun at all!

Good luck with the new hardware and OS install... hope you recover all of your data! *keeps fingers crossed for good luck*

[t00fri]

Ouch! No fun at all!

Good luck with the new hardware and OS install... hope you recover all of your data! *keeps fingers crossed for good luck*

Thanks! Fortunately I have backupped most of my data on 4 machines , yet restoring the many configuration files and scripts that I wrote for various purposes is quite tedious and time consuming ...


Bye Fridger

[Reiko]

Is there a way to make a mirror image of your hard drive to store on a separate drive? So if one drive crashes you have everything, including all of your settings, on another drive.

[selden]

Reiko,

There are many different options for creating a copy of your computer's main disk. They range from using a backup program which creates an archive file on a tape or on another disk, to utilities which create a copy of one disk on another (usually with the computer "down" and not doing anything else), to using a RAID disk configuration which maintains identical contents on two disks simultaneously while the system is running.

This last, using a RAID-1 configuration, would best describe the option you're asking about. This can be done using either software (inexpensive but lower performance) or hardware RAID controller (high performance but more expensive).

(Personally I use a variation of the first and second methods, copying important files to another disk manually, and also using Symantec's Ghost program to copy my Windows system disk to another disk every few months -- this also has the advantage of defragmenting it so the new copy runs faster than the old disk.)

[Reiko]

Reiko,

There are many different options for creating a copy of your computer's main disk. They range from using a backup program which creates an archive file on a tape or on another disk, to utilities which create a copy of one disk on another (usually with the computer "down" and not doing anything else), to using a RAID disk configuration which maintains identical contents on two disks simultaneously while the system is running.

(Personally I use a variation of the first and second methods, copying important files to another disk manually, and also using Symantec's Ghost program to copy my Windows system disk to another disk every few months -- this also has the advantage of defragmenting it so the new copy runs faster than the old disk.)

Thank you for the info. I'll give Symantec's Ghost a try.

[selden]

Reiko,

Bear in mind that using Ghost (or one of its competitiors) to "clone" your system disk means that you need to have a second disk identical to the main disk, and that the previous disk must be uncabled when you switch to using its copy.

In other words, the procedure that I use is
+ shut down computer
+ open system box and install spare disk
+ connect power and signal cables to spare disk as unit 1.
+ boot system from Ghost program disk
+ copy old system disk (unit 0) to second disk (unit 1)
(It takes about an hour to copy 100GB on my system)
+ shut down computer
+ uncable old (unit 0) system disk
+ recable new system disk as unit 0
(You can leave both disks in the system box, or if you're feeling especially paranoid, you can take the old disk out and put it somewhere safe.)
+ close up system box
+ boot from new system disk

Of course, this procedure works much more easily if you use external disks instead of internal disks, since you wouldn't have to open the system box.

[Reiko]

Oh I see. What I had in mind was making a duplicate of my hard drive and saving it on an external drive for a back up.

[selden]

Reiko,

That should work, too.

I just like to take advantage of the disk defragmenting which is a side effect of how Ghost makes the copy. It does it better than the defragmenter included with Windows XP.

[edit]
If your computer can boot from an external disk, it would be good to do that at least once after the copy has completed. That is one way to check to make sure the copy is OK. Too often it turns out that a backup that supposedly was OK didn't work. Once is too often!
[/edit]