Ghost for FreeBSD

[Mark]

----- 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.

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?

Thanks,

- Mark