Topic: Server "stuck" at Starting udev *** Solved ***

[Amir Inbar]

My Sme 7.3 server stoped responding so i rebooted it.
After the reboot, the server stoped the boot proccess at "Starting udev:" and the red light of the disk drive is constant on.

Assuming something happened to disk drive, I have tryed to recover the server using a new disk drive and the howto : http://wiki.contribs.org/Recovering_SME_Server_with_lvm_drives but with no sucsess.

The disk contains nearly 500G of UNBACKEDUP data so it is (a very good lesson for me to start backing up thins) very important for me to recover.

Can you help ?

[Amir Inbar]

Running TestDisk (http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk) found Invalid Raid Superblocks - dose this make sense ?

[Amir Inbar]

OK here is what i did :
I have build a new machine (not needed - i just wanted to be sure all devices function properly) and installed the crashed disk drive in it together with a brand new disk - the same size (can be bigger) 500Gb.
I used the excellent instructions from howtoforge (http://www.howtoforge.com/recover_data_from_raid_lvm_partitions) and modified the settings to suite my setup.

SME works differently so where the howto said :

vgchange VolGroup00 -a y

I did

vgchange main -a y

also, where the howto said :

mount /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 /mnt/data/

I did

mount /dev/main/root /mnt/data/

All done !!!
I am now restoring my precious data to a new disk !

Amir

[christian]

or I suppose you could have used the following in our "how-to" section of the wiki (though the title doesn't match your original concern):

http://wiki.contribs.org/UpgradeDisk

But it is great that you were able to solve the problem and actively worked it out yourself and posted for others to learn. We all benefit.

[Amir Inbar]

Christian, the how-to is great but for me there was one obstacle that prevented me from using it - the system was hang - i couldn't log to the server nor i could issue the sbin/e-smith/signal-event pre-backup command.
The only way i could approach towards retrieving my data back was to find a way to mount the partition.

This forum is so helpfull to all - it is only obvious i would share my findings with everyone.

Amir

[christian]

hmmm. ok. the pre-backup I believe just does a backup of the sql database. so that part may be missing after your restore from disk. depends how you restore from disk. You may need to consider this for any sql based apps.

the procedure mentioned is essentially the same as the SME 7 part of that how to minus the "pre-backup".