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Obsolete Releases => SME Server 7.x => Topic started by: wjhobbs on July 14, 2006, 06:50:10 PM

Title: SME 6.01 --> 7.0 Upgrade Taking a Long Time
Post by: wjhobbs on July 14, 2006, 06:50:10 PM

I have a not very powerful SME server (P2 450MHz, 256MB RAM) that has about 20GB of data on it.

Since there were no contribs added, I decided to do a simple upgrade using the SME 7.0 final CD. It has got to the point in the upgrade where the message says "Starting install process, this may take several minutes..."

The disk is constantly active. But the 'several minutes' has stretched past 24 hours!

I suspect that what is happening is that the 20+GB of data is being transferred to the new file structure that 7.0 uses. If so, I suspect that it is taking so long because much of the RAM is taken up with the ramdisks used by the install - so only a small amount of data can transfer with any given cycle. If these assumptions are valid, then it will finish when it finishes and all will be well.

Can anyone on the dev team give me some reassurance that things are progressing as they should?

What state will the machine be in if the process were halted at this point?

John

Title: SME 6.01 --> 7.0 Upgrade Taking a Long Time
Post by: byte on July 14, 2006, 07:43:28 PM

Have a look on the virtual terminals and see what they say, i.e Alt F2 so on.

Title: SME 6.01 --> 7.0 Upgrade Taking a Long Time
Post by: wjhobbs on July 14, 2006, 07:48:53 PM

byte,

alt-f2 opens a terminal that displays
-/bin/sh-3.00#
with the cursor positioned after the #.

No messages of any sort visible.

John

Title: SME 6.01 --> 7.0 Upgrade Taking a Long Time
Post by: byte on July 14, 2006, 07:50:13 PM

and so on? i.e Alt F3 - Alt F4 keep doing that and what do you see?

Title: SME 6.01 --> 7.0 Upgrade Taking a Long Time
Post by: wjhobbs on July 14, 2006, 08:00:54 PM

I appear to have a major problem.

Advice would be much appreciated.

alt-f4 shows a repeated I/O error on dev hda sector 193933365.

I do not have an adequate backup of the data. The second Raid drive in the array failed and I was hoping to get the data back from this drive by upgrading. Looks like I was wrong.

What is the best way to try to recover the data? I understand fsck doesn't work with a raid partition.

Any suggestions?

John

Title: SME 6.01 --> 7.0 Upgrade Taking a Long Time
Post by: byte on July 14, 2006, 08:03:29 PM

Ah now that is a problem...What I would do is download knoppix hook the harddrive in a machine or leave it in that machine and boot off knoppix and see if you can mount that harddrive.

Title: SME 6.01 --> 7.0 Upgrade Taking a Long Time
Post by: wjhobbs on July 14, 2006, 08:57:16 PM

byte,

You're a lifesaver.

I am now in the process of copying all of the ibay data to another drive using Knoppix.

Many thanks for the suggestion.

John

Title: SME 6.01 --> 7.0 Upgrade Taking a Long Time
Post by: byte on July 14, 2006, 09:04:26 PM

No worries, I always keep copy of knoppix on hand  8-)

Lesson learnt here - Always keep a good backup

Title: SME 6.01 --> 7.0 Upgrade Taking a Long Time
Post by: dsemuk on July 14, 2006, 09:46:06 PM

wjhobbs you have been lucky this time.  byte gave you good advice and you saved the data, next time you may not be so lucky.

Really you should have asked about the failed disk, you would have been told how to get the data off, before you risked the upgrade.  Whilst often reinstalling Windows over the top of a failed install is the only way to proceed this isn't the way with Linux.

Always worth having a Knoppix disk at hand, especially for Windows systems ;)

Dave