Klistvud -- excellent, thanks, that is definitely the way to go! I can see that the rescue CD from live.debian.net (actually from cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/squeeze_live_beta1/amd64/iso-hybrid/) contains everything I need, so I'll use that.
Now: in the interim, I've decided to take this opportunity to make my system RAID-1, so that I get an extra level of protection and also so that if I ever have another drive failure I can limp along on the other drive for the few days it will take me to get myself organized to recover. Also, I get to set up a RAID-1 array, which I don't yet know how to do, and learning is fun. As I understand it, the steps I need to take are: 1. Install the new hard drives 2. Boot off the rescue CD 3. Use fdisk and mdadm to set up the 2 drives as a RAID-1 array 4. Use LVM (or fdisk?) to partition the resulting array (boot, linux, and swap) 5. Recover my backup to the array via restore command. So now, a few new questions: 1. Is the list above generally correct? 2. When I installed Debian back in the summer I let the install script handle the disk partitioning. This time I have to do it manually. What size should I use for the boot and swap partitions? 3. Do I need to manually install and configure grub in order to make the RAID-1 array the boot disk? Again, this was handled for me by the installer script the first time around. 4. What, if anything, do I need to do so that the RAID-1 array is activated at boot time? Whew! Sorry for the huge stack of questions, any and all help, encouragement, etc, is welcome! Thanks in advance, -PT On Thu, Nov 11, 2010 at 8:16 AM, Peter Tenenbaum < peter.g.tenenb...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi everyone -- a few days ago the hard drive in my home Debian system > started making unhappy noises and refuses to boot. I discussed the > situation with knowledgeable people and they diagnosed that indeed the hard > drive had failed and needs replacement. > > I have a recent backup of the hard drive which I made using dump, and I > have a new hard drive on order. My recovery plan is as follows: > > 1. Burn a new netinst CD from a recent build (I am running Squeeze, btw) > 2. Replace the hard drive > 3. Use the netinst CD to set up the filesystem on the new hard drive > 4. Recover the backup using restore. > > Here's my question: should I allow the netinst CD to install Debian on the > new hard drive, given that I plan to use restore to restore everything and > thus would overwrite any new installation? I realize that I can probably > tune the action of the restore command so that it only restores what I need > from the backup and doesn't touch a new OS install; but I think that the > process of making the decisions for what needs to be restored and what does > not would be complex, time-consuming, and error-prone; so I would rather > just restore the whole thing. > > Any advice you can offer would be welcome. > > Thanks in advance, > -PT >
