Adding Drivers to the Live CD.

[Nifty Fedora Mitch]

On Thu, Jul 24, 2008 at 11:15:21AM -0400, Nathan Woodruff wrote:
> Sender: fedora-list-bounces at redhat.com
> 
>    I have a U2 server running Fedora. It has 4 500GB drives on an Adaptec
>    SATA Raid 2420SA card. Last week we had a power failure over night. The
>    UPS’s ran for about 2 hours and then POOF no power.  None of us even
>    though about checking on the servers that night. When our company
>    finally got power the next morning, the Fedora server would not boot
>    completely.
......
>    I need to add Adaptec’s driver to the Live CD to be able to recover
>    this data. But every tool that I have available to me can not read the
>    .IMG files on the Live CD in order to add Adaptec’s Raid driver.
> 
> 
>    Any help???

Do you have an alternate boot device, one that is not the Live CD?
Watch out for named mount points.....

If you can boot any alternate root file system read/write your life
can be improved.   i.e. open the 2U server and add a non raid disk
to load the OS on and do your repairs from.

If you boot your distro disk in 'rescue' mode can you see your Raid?

Booting the distro disk in rescue mode can give you network access.
With network access  you can transfer the driver for your RAID card to
a place that the running kernel can load it from.  One thing to check is
that the rescue disk kernel version may not match the kernel your saved
driver was built for.  Something like scp nathan at upsystem:/tmp/driver.ko
/tmp; modeprobe /tmp/driver.ko

Missing in your post was the steps you went through to get your Adaptec
card running.   You will need to retrace these steps to get there from
here.  See "your system notebook" for the do you remembers steps ;-)

Lastly adding the driver to the Live CD requires a live system to do the
work on....  Pulling apart a Live CD, changing the bits and reassembling
it correctly so it will boot is a bunch of work after which you still
have to repair the damage.

N.B. Alan Cox's comment about getting a prompt...



-- 
	T o m  M i t c h e l l 
	Looking for a place to hang my hat.