[K12OSN] Need advice on recovering from failed boot disk

[Julius Szelagiewicz]

> On Mon, Aug 15, 2011 at 11:28 AM, Carl Keil <carl at snarlnet.com> wrote:
>> Thanks for helping me.
>>
>> So, I tried the dd command, twice and then tried CloneZilla.  Twice. 
>> And
>> the failing drive just kept throwing more and more errors.  Even with
>> the
>> "move on after bad sectors" (or whatever it's called exactly) switch
>> thrown.  I think I need to give up on the miracle cure.  How was I ever
>> going to trust the copied disk anyway?  Wouldn't that just be latent
>> problems (half garbled config files, etc.) waiting to happen?
>>
>> Anyway, now I'm looking for a little more philosophical advice.  I used
>> to
>> run k12ltsp on this server, but don't any more.  Now it's a
>> web/samba/mythtv
>> box for my home.  If it was you, and your old k12-centos 5.3 box ate it,
>> but
>> you had homes, web root, samba shares and your mythtv shows on separate
>> drives, (and many complete backups via BackupPC) would you take the
>> opportunity to upgrade to centos 5.6 or 6.0 or would you try to get back
>> to
>> 5.3 so you didn't break all that stuff via new versions of php, mysql,
>> samba
>> (prolly not an issue) and mythtv?   What's the smart move here?  Also,
>> do
>> you think there'll be a problem going to 64 bit, when the old install
>> was 32
>> bit?  I can't see why that would be an issue since basically I'm
>> restoring
>> functionality to content that I saved.   If I go, for example from
>> 32-bit
>> Centos 5.3 to 64-bit Centos 6 will I still just be able to restore my
>> /etc
>> config files from backup and proceed on my merry way?  Or will I have to
>> go
>> into each one and cut and paste relevant sections into new config files
>> with
>> differing formats, places on the drive, etc.
>>
>> Also, How do you tell if your hardware should get a 64 bit centos or
>> not?
>> I'm not positive about my system.  I think it's a Pentium D dual core.
>> Obviously I'd check for sure before proceeding.  But what's considered
>> the
>> minimum CPU that actually works with 64 bit Centos?
>>
>
> I would upgrade to 5.6. I just installed a system using CentOS6. It
> installs ok but there are a number of changes in how to administer the
> system. In my case, I noticed that simple GUI utilities like
> system-config-bind-gui and system-config-network are no longer
> supported. Also, yumex doesn't seem to work quite right (crashes).  If
> you're ok with either letting Network manager automagically set things
> or enjoy manually configuring the network interfaces and the DNS zone
> info then 6 isn't so bad. However, RHEL/CentOS5 is supported till 2017
> (I think) which is quite long enough to build a test system to learn
> the in-and-outs of 6 before using it for production.
>
> Sincerely,
> Dave Hopkins

Dave,
 I'm running 2 CentOS 6 database servers now. The helpful trick was to set
one as a database server and the other as desktop environment. I ported
the kernel params from database server to the "desktop" server and it
became a nice server with the gui. Administration is much easier. I added
gui stuff to the other server as well.
julius