(OT) cool data recovery story from a bad drive (LVM)

From: Benedict Verheyen (linux4bene_at_pandora.be)
Date: 01/21/04

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    To: <debian-user@lists.debian.org>
Date: Wed, 21 Jan 2004 22:45:24 +0100

    Recently one of my 2 drives has gone bad.
    Not that big a deal but i didn't look forward to reinstalling
    the whole shabang.
    I use LVM and both drives are used in the same volume group so i
    wasn't sure that it was possible to save the data and keep the
    machine running without having to reinstall it.

    Well, i managed to keep the server running while saving the data
    that resides on the bad disk.
    Mind that only the /usr partition used PE's from the 2nd disk
    (the one that started failing).
    First i made a partition to copy all the data over from the
    old /usr. A lot of data was unrecoverable because of errors on
    that disk. I then adjusted fstab to point to the new partition
    to see if that would work. It did. Next i removed the bad disk
    from the volume group via lvreduce.
    I still have some PE's left to make a new /usr partition in the
    LVM partition. After that i copied the data over from the
    /usr partition to this newly created /dev/main/lv_usr (main being
    the volumegroup), again adjusted the fstab to reflect the change
    and rebooted.

    All services (fetchmail,exim4,spamassassin,clamav,procmail,apache
    ,courier,squirrelmail) kept on working just fine. To rebuild my
    /usr partition i started to do "apt-get --reinstall install <package>"
    for most packages that where installed. Most of the usr partition
    have now been rebuild and everything is working except my ddt-client.
    So i'm happy i didn't have to reinstall and it was a learning
    experience. I'll be closely monitoring the system to see if everything
    is stable but so far so good.

    Regards,
    Benedict 

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