SOLVED: System Drive Crashed, Now what....

[hhearst]

Hi Amahi Community.

So, my server won't boot up anymore. I get errors about can't read sectors and it goes to the grub rescue prompt. I set my root to hd0,1 and try an ls command and the I get bad sectors error again. I am guessing the drive is bad.

So, basically I had a 40GB drive with the OSS and a 700GB drive as the landing zone with multiple drives (3TB) as greyhole drives. So, I am assuming the data is safe on those drives.

Any recommendations on the best way to solve this issue? What do you do when the OS drive goes bad?

Any advice is appreciated. I have some experience with Linux but am more of a power user than an admin.

-Hal

[hhearst]

Found this post... very helpful: viewtopic.php?f=39&t=3790#p19229

[bigfoot65]

Do you still need help or is this resolved?

[hhearst]

Well, I am still down. I am trying to mine this for the "simple" list of what to do when your OS disk crashes. As I am so nervous about losing my data, I am still unclear exactly what to do and I last installed Amahi about 2 years ago, so I am having to learn some of this all over again. In the meantime, I have confirmed that my OS disk is bad and have replace it with a different spare drive and am in the process of burning a new express install disk. So, now I have the following:

1) Empty OS drive (80GB)
2) 700GB landing space drive
3) 2x3TB Greyhole drives

Could you (or someone) give me the high level steps of what I need to do when I run the install? I DO NOT want to lose my data (files) but can redo all the configuration, etc. Should I unplug the greyhole drives and add them later? Or, are their options in the install that will recover my files? If someone could summarize this process for me (or point out some best practices), I would really appreciate it.

Regards
-Hal

[bigfoot65]

Follow the Express install guidance at http://docs.amahi.org if using the Express DVD. If not, follow the wiki guidance for Amahi 7 full DVD. Greyhole is an add-on to Amahi, so there is no automatic option to add the drives back. It's all manual as it was when you initially installed.

Recommend you not connect the extra drives until the OS is installed and Amahi is up and running. Once you are ready to connect the drives, follow the adding a second hard drive to your HDA guidance in the wiki.

You will need to ensure all your shares are recreated exactly as they were before connecting drives and enabling Greyhole. The guidance to reconnect existing Greyhole storage pool is fairly detailed.

Once complete, it should start moving files. If it does not, you can force it via command line:

Code: Select all

greyhole -f -o

There should be no reason to worry about data loss since you are keeping the OS drive separate from your data.

[hhearst]

Thanks BigFoot. I think what is confusing me is that I had a separate disk that contained the LZ. Before I had:

700 GB mounted at /var/hda/files. If I remember correctly, for this drive, I had some shares in the greyhole pool, while other (/temp /junk for example) where not. Unfortunately, I did not backup the config. So, I assume the steps are as follows:

1) With only the new system drive attached, install Amahi. Make sure the server works.
2) Reconnect/Remount my old drives
700GB @ /var/hda/files
3TB @ /var/hda/files/drives/drive01
3TB @ /var/hda/files/drives/drive02
3) Do a little research over the drives to figure out what my shares were
4) Then follow in instruction in https://wiki.amahi.org/index.php/Reconn ... orage_pool to reconnect them all.

Does that sound right? Thanks for your help.

Regards
-Hal

[bigfoot65]

Yes that is a good plan.

[hhearst]

Hi Folks (and Bigfoot),

Thank for the help. We can mark this one as solved. Unfortunately, I went on a trip and took me a while to implement this, but here are steps I took to fix my problem. First off, a word of advice. Everyone... backup your /etc/fstab, /etc/greyhole.conf and your /etc/samba/samba.conf files. I sure wish I had done that. Life would have been so much easier. I have them backed up now.

The steps are pretty much in the earlier referred page on reconnecting storage drives, but I will list out what I did in hopes it is helpful to someone in the future.

1. Replaced my bad OS drive with a new one, and disconnected all other existing drive. This included the drive I was using as my LZ and my two storage pool drives.
2. Burn a disk and Install Amahi. Make sure the server works.
3. Reconnect & Remount my old drives in the same locations as before. Luckily there was an old forum post by me where I had described my setup. In hindsight, I am happy how I went with a 4 drive setup and had a dedicated drive for the landing zone.
4. After looking over the drives folder structures (especially the LZ), I used the Amahi web ui to recreate all my users and shares.
5. Then (as I don't have the greyhole UI), I basically went through the manual greyhole setup as described here. https://wiki.amahi.org/index.php/Amahi_ ... hole_Setup. I followed all the steps.
6. Once greyhole successfully started (took a few times due to errors in setting keeping my share names and greyhole conf files consistent), I ran the "greyhole --fsck".

So, the fsck ran for bit, and now I am back in business. I've done some testing and greyhole is doing its job. My server is back online and life is grand.

Regards
-Hal

[bigfoot65]

Happy to hear things are somewhat back to normal. Glad we were able to help.