On Thu, Jul 16, 2015 at 11:57:49AM -0500, o1bigtenor wrote:
Greetings
I have a large system with a fair number of resources which has just come home from the hospital (computer) when I had a disk drive fail abruptly.
1.The tech tells me that the hard drive can be accessed. How do I do a low level transfer to another hard drive? (This would mean that I would have empty sectors but there is some information that I would like to get.)
ddrescue can be handy for taking an image of a slightly defective disk to somewhere else, so that you can then experiment on the copy to recover things.
2. The drive was my 'operating system' drive. That meant that here is where I kept my 14 VirtualBox machines. (One was my business record keeping (accounting) and that is the one that I want real bad but its only 16 months of data so it can be redone but its painful!)
How do I set up the hard drive so that files can be moved to my RAID array (which should be just fine) - - - or should I? Should I be setting up this drive as it was before but just looking for a way to do backups? As I understand it operating systems on RAID isn't nice - - - or is it?
I think everything should be on RAID (and RAID0 doesn't count of course). OS, swap, data, everything. Disk failures happen, and they are a waste of time to have to deal with. RAID is of course NOT backup and not a sustitute (since RAID does nothing to protect against data corruption and user errors).
I am looking for something that doesn't crap out so completely. I understand I should have had backups but I wasn't able to get the shared folder stuff working so that I could seamlessly transfer stuff to my main array. That would also be a viable option if someone can tell me how to cudgel VirtualBox into submission.
Questions welcomed.
-- Len Sorensen