SOLVED Whole Server Restore

[AwesomeRob]

Hi,

Just had a massive failure. We use an Acronis backup system which backs up the whole Virtual Machine.

I've created a new Virtual Machine and replicated the disks etc and restored the whole server onto the disks of /boot /home /swap.

The problem is that it isn't booting. It just sits at a black screen.

Is it possible to restore CPanel in this way and if it is does anyone know how to get it to boot? For example I can boot a live cd and edit grub or files etc but I don't know what I'm editing.

I tried to raise a support ticket to ask CPanel but it's hard to create a support ticket when I can't get an Support Reference ID and the only way to get that is within WHM.

 

[cPRex]

Hey there!

Sorry to hear about the failures on your side! That's never a fun thing to deal with.

I'm not sure if replicating the boot disk will work properly. I'd much rather do something like this:

-install CentOS
-install cPanel
-perform recovery work

We have a disaster recovery guide that includes details on mounting the old disks here:

Full Disaster Recovery | cPanel & WHM Documentation

In some circumstances, experienced system administrators may need to completely restore a server from a crashed or failed hard drive.

docs.cpanel.net

As far as the support ticket, our help is going to be very minimal for this type of situation, but we can always offer advice. You can pull the support access ID directly from the server by running this command:

/usr/local/cpanel/cpanel -S

Let me know if you need more details on any of that!

 

[cPAdminsMichael]

Generally I'd suggest and recommend what @cPRex mention...
I assume that even though you only mention /boot, /home and /swap that you also have the other directories recovered? Maybe you are then just missing GRUB bootloader.
Worth a try.... run grub-install /dev/sda (if /boot is installed to sda)

 

[andrew.n]

If you use Acronis then it should be bootable just like R1Soft bare metal recovery. I suggest you to reach out to their support, they are usually quite helpful.

 

[AwesomeRob]

If anyone is interested it does work from a full backup of the system.

I actually missed off the boot partition the first time I tried to restore. I added all the drives and partitions back and it worked fine.

The only thing that didn't work was the network adapter. Because the system had changed it was adding eth1 because the system still had eth0 in its config.

I amended /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules so it would use eth0 instead of eth1 and everything was good.

 

[andrew.n]

Glad it worked out in the end, great job!