On Sun, Nov 01, 2009 at 07:08:00PM -0500, Andrew Reid wrote: > On Sunday 01 November 2009 17:57:49 Andrew Sackville-West wrote: > > > > > So here is the real success part of the story: my backups worked! I > > had weekly backups of /etc and daily backups of /home. Since I'd not > > done any work of consequence in about 24 hours, I had not lost data! > > Restoring was a simple matter of copying over from the backup server, > > fixing up a couple of permissions and moving on. > > > > Lessons learned: > > 1) don't do risky things in DOS 6.22 when tired... you can't trust > > DOS to behave in a consistent manner (maybe) > > > > 2) keep a copy of the boot sector lying around (on another machine!!) > > 3) keep a copy of dpkg --get-selections lying around > > > Congratulations! > > If it were within my power, I'd award you the Order of the Clue, > the one with the *nice* ribbon.
:) > > For the sysems I back up at work, we do the dpkg --get-selections > thing, but I've never kept a copy of the boot sector -- that's an > excellent idea. It turns out it would not have really helped in this situation because of writes in other parts of the disk, but in other, slightly less catastrophic situations, it would have been useful. If I had managed to understand what was going on between the part where the MBR got munched and other bits started flying out to the disk, it would have worked to just rewrite the MBR and reboot. A
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature
