I am pleased to say that I was able to get my system back up, with the help of my colleague, in about 12 hours. Thank you all so much for your support. As it turns out, we didn't attempt a complete restore of the original system, but just did an install of RHEL 4 and put the services we needed back on, then copied the config files & data files and prayed! With only needing to get some obscure perl packages, (and gcc compiler, which I forgot to install at first, blush!), we got our system back up. RHEL 4 changed the Perl executable paths from RHEL3. I hate that. Again, thank you all very much for your input, I'll be looking into making a "keychain drive" boot image for this type of restore. WAB
________________________________ From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] on behalf of Gene Heskett Sent: Tue 2/27/2007 11:43 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: bare metal restore, basically On Tuesday 27 February 2007, Byarlay, Wayne A. wrote: >So, I have this machine which had all its filesystems being backed up by >AMANDA, and the /dev/sda died. > >Is there a method I can use to boot from, say, Ubuntu, or knoppix, or >some other CD-based OS, run the AMANDA client, connect to the server >where the latest backups reside, and basically rebuild this machine with >only one /dev/sda? > >Right now I'm dead in the water... > >wab Doing almost exactly that with nothing but a cd with dd tar & gzip on it, was the driving force behind my writing a handfull of scripts collectively called Genes-Amanda-Helper-0.5. After the fact they won't help much, so this is a case of hoping the amanda on the cd is 100% compatible with the one you used to make the archive in the first place. Back up dumpcycle days, take that tape, read the first block, which will tell you how to recover that file, then do it. When you get to the end of that tape, see if you have enough to pull a listing off the next tape using amanda's tools, if not, repeat the dd exersize with the next newer tape. You will never get a set of indice files that aren't a day out of date though, so it will be a bit of touch and go. With my scripts wrapping amanda up, backups made will have the complete amnada configuration, and the complete indice files all appended to the end of each and all tapes including the last tape, indices which are current including the contents of that same tape, which when applied to the amanda on the rescue cd, may or should, make the recovery a lot less painless since amanda will then have full knowledge of the backups available right up to the last backup before the disk failure. If at that point you can mount that disk in its original location so amanda can put it back from whence it got it, you should be good to go & just let amanda do it. -- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) Yahoo.com and AOL/TW attorneys please note, additions to the above message by Gene Heskett are: Copyright 2007 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.
