So this is part cautionary tail and part question. I shut down a
computer that had been up for YEARS without problem to add a disk drive.
Then it wouldn't restart. (boot drive failed)
When I installed the New OS (FC10) on the new boot disk, somehow I
overwrote the wrong drive .. I blame the change from /dev/hda-z where
a-z corresponds to the location of the drive to /dev/sda-z where a-z is
just the order assignment of the drive.
I just wrote down a bunch of details here:
http://www.kangry.com/topics/viewcomment.php?index=18539
But the short if it was that even though I apparently overwrote one of
the drives I was able to pull out an old LVM header off of one of the
drives and edit it enough to force it to mount my partition (even though
it was royally screwed up)
lessons I learned :
* *BACKUP EVRYTHING EVEN CONFIG FILES*
* Unplug drives you don't want to install onto
* Backup the LVM configuration ( On another computer) /Before/ you
start screwing with it.
* Backing up the size of the partitions would have also been useful
It's apparent to me that the drive in question was also re-partitioned.
I think the old default /boot size was 100Mb now it's 200Mb. I'm
considering a few possible approaches to getting the little bit of data
I lost on the home partition that I would like back.
1. just scan the drive for strings I expect to find in my missing
perl scripts. and pull out the raw data. None are larger than one
cluster.
2. scan the drive for the old lvm header and try to calculate where
the old partition was, reset + see if I can mount.
3. both
4. neither. Just bite the bullet and rewrite.
I figure I have a good chance of pulling this off because the home
partition also had several large disk images (~5 Gb each ) (for qemu)
that I don't care at all about. with any luck, the 2~3 Gb that was
written to the space where the disk images were. since the scripts were
mostly newer, I'm hoping they will be in the un-screwed part of the disk
Any suggestions as to how I should proceed? It's not critical. The most
complex script, couldn't possibly take me more than a few hours to
replace. And the replacement will probably be better.
--Russell
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