Server wont boot; can we recover from the data on the drive?

[stugster]

We've got a CentOS cPanel server that wont boot (fsck failed).

What we'd like to do is pull the data from /home, /usr, etc. and build the account from that. Is there an easy way to do this? We found a few sites that suggest what dirs/files to move over, but in a virtualised test environment this doesn't work.

It would be nice if there was a tool by cPanel that could do this from a dead disk?

If not, we have backups; would just be a nice way to pull from the literally lasted data we have.

 

[PenguinInternet]

Yes, this should be recoverable. This is not a cPanel issue though, it is OS related and so not something in my opinion that cPanel should be supporting. You should be able to boot the server from a CentOS live CD, mount the filesystem and copy the data off as required.

 

[stugster]

Oh yeah, definitely. I suppose I worded it badly. It would be nice for us to be able to grab a fresh server, fresh install, then attach the bad disk to that via USB then execute a tool to pull it all in.

We've pulled from R1Soft for the time being, but it was just a thought as we were going through the motions

 

[PenguinInternet]

An issue to consider with doing that is that if there is corruption to the content on the old drive, you'll just be copying this over to the new server and so possibly transferring the issue. Glad to hear you're back up and running again though.