On Tuesday morning my HDD failed on my PC at the office.  Most of my important data is in a NFS volume on a FAS6030, but my PC still had some important stuff on it.  Including a Windows XP virtual machine that has all my necessary programs (Outlook, SAP, TweetDeck) and some files that I forgot to copy over to my NFS share.  Using a tool called ddrescue I was able to save most of my data, I’ll go into how it works and what I did.

Read More…

Created on January 29, 2009 by Rick Scherer

Posted under Good Reading, Linux.

This blog has 12,136 views and 6 responses.

Tags: ddrescue, disk, e2fsck, fsck, partition, recovery

(2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

 Loading ...

 Print This Post

I know this isn’t virtualization related, but a colleague of mine was attempting to clone 20 HP x4600 desktops running RedHat Enterprise Linux 5 and was having a heck of a time.  Using Ghost or Altiris would image the disk but during boot it would get a kernel panic. Reason being, the LVM wasn’t being copied properly with these tools.  After doing some quick research I recommended using Clonezilla, an open source tool that has support for a number of different partition types, including most Linux, Windows, Mac and LVM2.

There are two options for Clonezilla, a Live edition which boots via CD (or local install) and allows a disk to disk copy or even partition to partition copy.  The other edition is SE, which includes a DRBL server and allows multicasting of the cloning – basically allowing you to image multiple desktops at the same time from a single source.

As I type this, I’m thinking of a cool use for this product. Because ESX guests support PXE, you can connect to a DRBL server and do a quick and easy P2V of your Linux based machines.  Perhaps I should test this on my own! (Maybe P2V a Mac to ESX?)

Created on January 21, 2009 by Rick Scherer

Posted under Good Reading.

This blog has 8,547 views and 5 responses.

Tags: clone, clonezilla, drbl, p2v, partition, pxe

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...

 Print This Post