davecove wrote:
> I lost my 11.1 install to a power outage yesterday (safe boot worked but
> X kept choking). When I reinstalled and let the installer format my root
> partition, I lost all of my installed driver/apps/etc. Bad Idea… but I
> learned something about Suse recovery. It looked to me as tho if I had
> copied my entire root partition (dev/sda2) to a DVD+RW (or better yet,
> my NAS) in advance, I could have just copied the whole thing back in
> place and been good to go.
>
> True? Could I ‘snapshot’ my root partition and then bulk copy it back
> in using the safe boot option command line?
While risky, in general it will work (no guarantees).
(using single user runlevel is better than using “safe” mode though. “safe”
isn’t for doing work, it’s more for troubleshooting now. Sometimes, “safe”
isn’t safe at all… it’s a last ditch effort thing… and sometimes it
does the opposite, won’t boot at all.)
Did you copy from /dev/sda2? Raw filesystem image?
Then:
cp rawfsimage /dev/sda2
should restore. If the image is stored remotely on another platform then:
ssh remotesystem “cat rawfsimage” >/dev/sda2
See below for NAS example…
>
> If so, what would be the best thing to take the snapshot with? tar?
The only safe way to “snapshot” is with a snapshotting feature of
a filesystem or disk abstraction (e.g. LVM). Even so, some applications,
e.g. databases, may have to be put into a snapshot state themselves that
is independent of the filesystem/disk snapshot.
>
> If I did use NAS, how would I get smb/cips started at the command line
> to copy it back?
If you’re talking about booting into “rescue mode” or you’re talking about
runlevel 1, you have to make sure your ethernet driver module is loaded.
If you do:
/sbin/ifconfig -a
And see your ethernet device (e.g. eth0), then you have the module.
Then you can configure a static IP like so:
/sbin/ifconfig eth0 AAA.BBB.CCC.DDD netmask 255.255.255.0
You might also need a default gateway:
route add default gw WWW.XXX.YYY.ZZZ
Or if you’re using dhcp, you can run dhcpcd to try to get an
address, gateway, etc that way.
dhcpcd -t 99999 eth0
Verify with:
/sbin/ifconfig eth0
(replace with your device name, typically eth0)
Try to ping your default gateway (usually pingable):
ping WWW.XXX.YYY.ZZZ
If that works, you probably have what you need.
For a NAS, you likely need to mount a filesystem off of it…
if “rescue mode” you can make a temporary mount point inside
of /tmp and mount to it.
mkdir /tmp/tmpmount
mount nasserver:/nasdirectory /tmp/tmpmount
cp /tmp/tmpmount/rawfsimage /dev/sda2
(use the nasserver IP if you don’t have DNS)
I’m pretty sure you can do NFS mounts in rescue mode (I think)
without having to do anything (provided you have network
connectivity).
HTH,
Chris