2009-11-08

Laptop disk go klicky klicky. Disaester recovery.

Started to download RC3 on Friday night and heard that sound that makes admins get the cold sweats. "Klick, erk, klick". I didn't see any errors in my dmesg so I just went to bed.. well oh boy guess what. No disks fer you in the morning. Sigh. Spend Saturday working out how one recovers what data one can from an encrypted partition. I actually got a lot off more than I expected.

The journal seemed to be one of the sectors dieing so I could not get it to do much. "mount -o ro,noload" is your friend with journalled file systems that are bad. This does not replay the journal so any data that was 'stuck' in there goes bye-bye.. seems I lost most of Friday's work email.. sigh.. going to have to deal with that on Monday.

Learned another important thing. If you have a backup script.. and edit it to do dry-runs while testing options... make sure you turn off dry-runs later. Lost a weeks worth of backups that way..

Got my Optiplex box installed with RC1 and updated to what was equivalent to my last rpm-qa listing. That took most of Sunday because 110kByte downloads are slow for several GB of updates and RPMs. I think I am going out to get another backup USB drive tomorrow to do another set of backups to put one set offsite.

So lessons learned:
1) FC12beta rescue works great. I need to make a USB key for FC12 when it comes out. Put that in the 'safe' for later.
2) Make sure your backups are run regularly.. and you have offsite backups of data one week old or older.
3) Stay calm.

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