[GTALUG] Advice request

[William Park]

On Thu, Jul 16, 2015 at 11:57:49AM -0500, o1bigtenor wrote:
> Greetings
> 
> I have a large system with a fair number of resources which has just come
> home from the hospital (computer) when I had a disk drive fail abruptly.
> 
> 1.The tech tells me that the hard drive can be accessed. How do I do a low
> level transfer to another hard drive?
> (This would mean that I would have empty sectors but there is some
> information that I would like to get.)

'dd' is the usual answer.  But, on a failing disk, it may really kill
it.  I've been told that freezing your disk helps with recovery.

> 
> 2. The drive was my 'operating system' drive. That meant that here is where
> I kept my 14 VirtualBox machines. (One was my business record keeping
> (accounting) and that is the one that I want real bad but its only 16
> months of data so it can be redone but its painful!)
> 
> How do I set up the hard drive so that files can be moved to my RAID array
> (which should be just fine) - - - or should I?
> Should I be setting up this drive as it was before but just looking for a
> way to do backups?
> As I understand it operating systems on RAID isn't nice - - - or is it?

Well, I don't recommend changing your setup, when you're doing recovery.
Do the recovery first.

Afterwards, you can use RAID for OS.  I think, most distro still ask for
separate boot partition, eg. /boot as ext4 for MBR setup, and of course
/boot/efi as fat32 for UEFI setup.  And, do backup.

> 
> I am looking for something that doesn't crap out so completely. I
> understand I should have had backups but I wasn't able to get the shared
> folder stuff working so that I could seamlessly transfer stuff to my main
> array. That would also be a viable option if someone can tell me how to
> cudgel VirtualBox into submission.
> 
> Questions welcomed.
> 
> TIA
> 
> Dee

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