Recover Data from failed HDD

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#1 Mon, 06/24/2013 - 04:05
alexnicol

Recover Data from failed HDD

I had JUST got Virtualmin up and running as required, JUST finished dumping old mail into it through IMAP folders, and the £$%^&ing HDD failed.

It would appear that doing the backup actually tipped the drive over the edge, so I dont even have a complete backup of the drive.

I have put a new drive in the machine and have reinstalled, (as with all IT... IT MUST BE RUNNING). The old drive will still fire up, load and work for a while, until it gets too stressed then bums out again.

My Question is: I cannot complete a backup using the virtualmin web interface. Is there a way of plugging the drive into a USB caddy and copying the old emails off the system? I assume its a case of dumping them into the relevant HOME directory, but do I need to update any DBs or lists with the emails I'm pulling across?

Kind Regards

Alex

Mon, 06/24/2013 - 09:28
andreychek

Howdy,

Sorry to hear about your hard drive!

If all you're looking to do is get email from your old drive to your new one -- email is just a bunch of text files, and there's nothing else you'd need to do... you can simply copy email from the old drive to your new one.

-Eric

Wed, 06/26/2013 - 04:16
alexnicol

Thanks for this. I now have the old HDD in a caddy plugged into the server.

The server has recognised it as /dev/sdf with 2 partitions sdf1 and sdf2 (the data one)

The data type is LINUX LVM. I tried to use the MOUNT command, but got an invalid filetype with LVM and it failed miserably with ext3.

Can you add any further suggestions please?

Kind Regards

Alex

Wed, 06/26/2013 - 08:12
andreychek

Howdy,

I just wanted to verify -- did you get this working? According to another a post you made in another forum thread, it sounds like you successfully retrieved your files, but I just wanted to make sure!

-Eric

Fri, 06/28/2013 - 05:30
alexnicol

If I connect the HDD to another machine, it will boot up and give me access, but it wont connect to a network. So I was able to SEE the file to nano it and copy the details.

I tried to mount the HDD through a caddy to the server. Webmin did detect the drive and give me the option to mount it, but I got errors about invalid files and mount points.

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