Repair - Reinstall - Restore

[Olaf Olson]

As I often do, I read each and every piece of advice given, including 
the VERY tempting "Yank the plug". Then I tried something else.

I  put in the install CD, booted to it, went through the install 
process. When I got to the partition section, I chose manual partition 
and then just chose to mount all of the partitions, except root, just as 
they were. Of course, I got warnings about how dreadful an idea that was 
and warnings about how the thing may not work correctly, but... what the 
heck? I would only have to reinstall everything if it failed, anyway, right?

After beginning to copy the image to my hard drive, so it could begin 
the install, the installer told me that there wasn't enough disk space 
to create the image and begin the install. OK. so I went back and 
started again; once you click OK on the partition scheme, you can't back 
up and set a new one. The second pass, I chose to delete a large 
partition, /home, where I didn't have much going on anyway. The 
installer used that for my temporary image space and installed.

It's up. It's working. User home directories were on /usr, which was not 
erased, so all I had to do was create accounts that had the same name 
and id number. I have had to reinstall a couple of applications, like 
webmin (what a prize!) and firefox/thunderbird. I also had to get 
freshrpms back in my yum.conf and a few other little things like that, 
but all in all, I am surprised and pleased with the result!

When I install YDL4, I am going to leave some blank, unused disk space, 
so I can do this procedure again, without having to delete anything to 
reinstall missing.

Oh yeah, would I recommend doing this procedure at home? Only out of 
sheer desperation. I really think that a professional would use another 
procedure, like making an actual backup, then restoring it when a 
miserable thing like this occurs, creating an emergency shutdown 
procedure for when power vanishes. getting a bigger UPS, etc. That is, 
of course, next on my list!

Thanks for the advice!

Olaf

mascarasnake wrote:

>
>
> Brian McKee wrote:
>
>>
>> On Wednesday, October 6, 2004, at 02:15  PM, mascarasnake wrote:
>>
>>> <ReallyRecklessAdvice>
>>> If you can't get the install disk to cooperate with 'linux rescue', 
>>> you can hard shutdown your box (eg. unplug it) and reboot, making 
>>> certain to run 'fsck' on reboot. If the drive is already fried...
>>> </ReallyRecklessAdvice>
>>
>>
>>
>> A less, ummmm, exciting approach is to type as root
>> shutdown -F -r now
>> The -F will force fsck to run on reboot.
>>
>> Although yanking the plug may be more emotionally satisfying :-)
>> HTH
>> Brian
>
>
> Dang, there it is, again, in the first man page. Although, yanking the 
> cable out of the wall and screaming at the top of your lungs does have 
> it's merits.
>
>
>> -- 
>> "I don't understand," said the scientist, "why you lemmings all rush 
>> down
>> to the sea and drown yourselves."
>> "How curious," said the lemming. "The one thing I don't understand is 
>> why
>> you human beings don't."
>>                 -- James Thurber
>>
>
> excellent quote. Thurber seemed to understand a lot more than most 
> folks do today.
>