[ale] Fingers crossed, bare iron restore

Tue Apr 13 20:37:53 EDT 2004

Awesome!! I've been watching mondo for a while and it's looks to be a
rather complete backup solution. I have not had the opportunity to give
it a full work out. I still just do the dump to tape routine with a copy
of my config files and partitions (as a text file "fdisk -l /dev/hdx >>
part_bak.txt").

It sounds like you did a great bit of work to prep for this and it seems
to have all paid off. WooHoo! 

ALE talk ??

On Tue, 2004-04-13 at 19:39, BruceG wrote:
> Hey all,
> 
>    I've been asking the list about backups and restores for quite a while, and 
> finally tried it out on my desktop. My desktop is dual boot. It runs Windows 
> ME on a 6 gig disk (/dev/hda) and SuSE 9.0 Pro on a 40 gig disk (/dev/hdb). 
> hdb1 is swap and hdb2 is tons 'o fun. Googling got me to Hugo Rabson and 
> Mondo Rescue.
> 
>    I went to http://www.mondorescue.org and downloaded Mondo and Mindi RPMs 
> for SuSE 9.0 The development version has more day-to-day work going on, and 
> seems to have good support in the mailing list, so I installed the 
> development version.
> 
>    The site gives a good list of prerequisites. SuSE 9.0 was pretty good. I 
> did have to go here: http://www.mikenjane.net/~mike/  for notes on running 
> mondo on the SuSE platform. I also had to download a "fixed" newt RPM and 
> make a symlink (documented on the website).
> 
>    After installing, I ran mondoarchive and backed up my dual-boot system to 
> tape. You have an option to leave specific directories out of the backup, or 
> to backup only specific directories. My work laptop runs Win2K and I backed 
> it up (8.2 gigs) to a Samba share on my SuSE desktop. I decided not to back 
> that up to tape (hoping to not lose both my desktop and my laptop at the same 
> time. I may buy another tape to cover it, but work does the OS and 
> application installs on fried laptops, so I may just back up my user data).
> 
>    I selected to do a complete backup, with the exception of /home/bgriffis/
> Backups (my thinkpad stuff). A quick 8 hours later, I had a tape. Oh - 
> another thing: my desktop is only a PII 266 w/ 384Meg of RAM. It might have 
> been quicker with more CPU. Mondo was taking a good 70% of my CPU, and I was 
> pretty much maxed out. Mondorescue did not pick up my tapes mount point, but 
> gives you the option of telling it where it is. I just filled in "/dev/ht0" 
> to tell Mondo where the tapedrive was. I felt like I was back in Computer 
> Operator land of years gone by (I'm sure a great many of you have done time 
> in the tape library!).
> 
>    Mondo writes out an image file, /root/images/mindi.iso.  This is an image 
> of YOUR current running system, YOUR kernel, and YOUR modules. My desktop 
> doesn't have a CD burner, so I copied it to my son's Toshiba laptop and 
> burned it to CD. Mondo also writes out a boot, a root and several data floppy 
> images. I could not boot from the floppy boot image, but it could have been a 
> faulty floppy disk. I didn't chase it down.
> 
>    I booted my PC using the mindi.iso CD. I entered mondorestore to get the 
> gui screen, and selected a partial restore. I restored my home directory to 
> make sure it worked. Success!!
> 
>    Now for the scary part. A few days after I decided to do a "nuke." That 
> checks your partitions, formats your drives (wipes everything!!!) and 
> restores. You can change your filesystem if you select expert restore. I'm no 
> expert, so just went with a "nuke."
> 
>    All sorts of scary warnings came up, I held my breath, crossed my fingers 
> and hit enter (with said crossed fingers). I was able to restore from tape! I 
> booted the PC, and got an error message "unable to boot, insert floppy, ... - 
> your standard hosed MBR message. I booted from my WinME rescue floppy (make 
> sure to make rescue floppies BEFORE nuking!!!) and did a "sys c:" to restore 
> the MBR.
> 
>    Mondo also had problems with grub, or I possibly hosed that part as well. 
> Mondo has an option to restore grub, and I tentatively typed away the 
> following magical commands:
> 	bash: mount-me
> 	bash: chroot /mnt/RESTORING
> 	bash: grub-install '(hd0)'
> 	bash: exit
> 	bash: unmount-me
> 
> 	Those fingers got crossed one more time for good luck, and I rebooted. My 
> grub option list came up, and I booted into Windows to make sure the kid's 
> games still worked. Success!!! I then rebooted, and went into Linux. SuSE 9.0 
> Pro came up, looking just like it did when I started the backup Friday night. 
> Samba was working, files were where I thought they should be. Everything just 
> simply worked.
> 
> 	I know on the list we discussed tape versus disk versus CD. I'm backing up 
> about 6 gigs, and a WHOLE lot more if I decide to include my laptop image and 
> my wife's laptop image. I decided to go with tape for now, as it is better 
> than no backups at all (I've been there way too many times). Mondo does 
> support backup/restore from CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R, DVD-RW, Tape, NFS, and disk 
> (hmmm. USB 2.0 attached disk sounds like a good option!). As my budget 
> improves, I'll probably opt for a hefty external disk drive. 
> 
> 	For dual-boot people, the Win9X worked fine (well, except I messed up 
> somewhere and had to do the "sys c:" thing). I can't say anything about NTFS 
> and Win2K / WinXP support. I haven't tried it.
> 
> 	Notes: read the Mondo manuals for both 1.6 and 1.7. Read the mondo HTML guide 
> (that has a LOT of information) BEFORE restoring. (I read AFTER restoring). 
> Subscribe to the mailing list. There are people using it on lots of different 
> distributions - but it pays to check first.
> 
> 	Part one of the backup question is working. Now to figure out what to do with 
> my laptops. Hmmm, go dual-boot and use Mondorescue's NFS option? For now I'll 
> just back up specific directories while I watch how the NTFS folks make out.
> Bruce
> 
> _______________________________________________
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> Ale at ale.org
> http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
-- 
James P. Kinney III          \Changing the mobile computing world/
CEO & Director of Engineering \          one Linux user         /
Local Net Solutions,LLC        \           at a time.          /
770-493-8244                    \.___________________________./
http://www.localnetsolutions.com

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
<jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
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