Ghost for FreeBSD

[Vincent Poy]

On Mon, 8 Sep 2003, Mark wrote:

> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Vincent Poy" <vince at oahu.WURLDLINK.NET>
> To: "Mark" <admin at asarian-host.net>
> Cc: "Ruben de Groot" <mail23 at bzerk.org>; <questions at freebsd.org>; "Joshua
> Oreman" <oremanj at www.get-linux.org>
> Sent: Thursday, September 04, 2003 10:16 AM
> Subject: Re: Ghost for FreeBSD
>
> Sorry for the tardiness of my reply (see below); I was otherwise engaged.
>
> > > But what if I just made a boo-boo on the root partition? My quandary has
> > > always been that I know of no way to restore the / slice on the existing
> > > disk-set (RAID-1). I can boot off the CD, but then I am still stuck on
> > > the same / slice. Although I have not yet messed up / to the point of
> > > having to do a full restore, this might well be needed at some point (an
> > > extended power-outage, for instance, ruining the file-system).
> >
> > Well, if you made a error on the root partition, this assumes you
> > did not mirror your errors to the backup drive... Then all you have to do
> > is boot using the backup drive from the Boot Manager.
> >
> > > Would it work if I mounted a "spare" partition, on the same array,
> > > restore the root partition therein, and then edited /etc/fstab
> > > accordingly? It seems to me, though, that the kernel cannot possibly use
> > > /etc/fstab to determine what device the root partition will be, as
> > > /etc/fstab is itself on that root-partition. So, I then take it the MBR
> > > supplies the entry-point for FreeBSD to boot from (which will be
> > > considered the root partition), so that booting of a "spare" slice would
> > > require an edit in the MBR (which I am not too keen on doing, btw).
> >
> > No, you would not have to mount it. Assuming you had the FreeBSD
> > Boot Manager on the drives...
>
> Ok. But this still means that, in order to restore the root partition, I
> will need to boot from a different drive, right? And I have no other,
> bootable drive in the machine: just the array. I had hoped that booting from
> the FreeBSD boot CD would have the same effect as booting from a different
> hard disk; but alas, the FreeBSD boot CD mounts the existing array, which
> brings me back to square one.

	Yeah, basically you just need to get FreeBSD booted up so that you
can use the dump/restore commands.

> Which, of course, prompts the question: is there not a way to boot from the
> FreeBSD boot CD that does not use the existing array?

	No idea about that one since you can always boot using the
root/mfs and fixit floppies and then mount/dump/restore.

> Thanks,
>
> - Mark


Cheers,
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