#21 2019-09-09 18:46:19

Martin

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From: Stockholm, Sweden

Registered: 2015-10-01

Posts: 799

Website

Re: Accidentally re-formatted boot sector :-(

Thanks for the effort! Very enlightening.
Comments and attempted answers/explanations inserted below.

Lets sort out all contradictory information:

You hawe formated md0 (sda1-sdb1, raid1) /boot.
In december it was not mounted either..

/boot will be populated again when you reinstall grubb.
(200 mb is small, with disks of today. If you reinstall, set at least 500 mb aside for /boot. Btw, I prefer ext2 on /boot. No need for journaling FS on /boot...)

Md0 is healthy.

Good. I will try re-installing Grub later. Is there any drawback with ext4 for /boot? (I don't remember why I did this choice.)

Md1 swap (sda1-sdb1 raid0) - healthy

Good.

Mdx (sda5-sdb5) / - missing
Only sda5 mounted on /
What does your /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf says?

Mdx has to be reasembled.

Mdxx (sda6-sdb6) /home - missing
Only sda6 mounted on /home
Mdxx has to be reasembled.

Raiding is governed by btrfs for these.

Md2 (sda7-sdb7 raid0!) /extra - healty
Whith raid0, all information is lost if one in the raidgroup gets lost. Good for perfomrance, bad for redundancy... You are aware of that you have mixed raid9 and raid1?

I use redundancy for /boot and where I store user data and go for speed elsewhere.

I would ensure that partion on sda5 and sda6 is healthy before reasembling.
First backup essential data, then reboot on an rescue-cd.

So installing Grub from the still running system to get Grub installed does not work (see a previous post)? It is only possible from the 'outside' using a rescue-cd?

If you are not familiar with raid management, it probably means more work than reinstalling BL Helium...

Installing BL-helium and uppgrade Debian to Buster, is safe.
You can choose to stay with Helium until official release of lithium. But, Lithium-dev, is not unstable...

Very tempting. There are one or two updates available in Buster I'd rather get access to.

/Martin

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"Problems worthy of attack
prove their worth by hitting back."
Piet Hein

rbh

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From: South of Lapplands inland

Registered: 2016-08-11

Posts: 1,921

Re: Accidentally re-formatted boot sector :-(

Good. I will try re-installing Grub later. Is there any drawback with ext4 for /boot? (I don't remember why I did this choice.)

Ext3/4 is journaling filesystem. There is not much writing to /boot, hence no need for journal.

Raiding is governed by btrfs for these.

So I've learned someting new again. Sofar I've onlu used btrfs for ReactOS installation. Maybe time to look closer att it.

So installing Grub from the still running system to get Grub installed does not work (see a previous post)? It is only possible from the 'outside' using a rescue-cd?

No. Only fsck, require to boot on rescue-disk. If your btrfs-raid is heathy, no need to reboot.
But!... maybe you will run inte trouble installing grubb to raided partition.

When I installed my server for a couple of years, i did not raided boot. Now, i thougt it would be time to do it. When I added the boot partion to an raid, i ended up with an empty ext2 fs. When i reinstalled grub, I got an error, saying that ext2, does not support embedding. Same error message when i formated to ext3 or ext4..
No problem reinstall grubb when i broke up the raid for /boot.

Let us know how you manage.

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// Regards rbh

Please read before requesting help: "Guide to getting help", "Introduction to the Bunsenlabs Lithium Desktop" and other help topics under "Help & Resources" on the BunsenLabs menu

Martin

Member

From: Stockholm, Sweden

Registered: 2015-10-01

Posts: 799

Website

Re: Accidentally re-formatted boot sector :-(

I tried installing grub from command line. No error messages but re-booting did not go well so I decided to re-install Helium. I now have a very bare-bones Helium install and will try upgrading to Debian 10 before I invest any time in re-creating my set-up and program favourites installation.

/Martin

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"Problems worthy of attack
prove their worth by hitting back."
Piet Hein

Martin

Member

From: Stockholm, Sweden

Registered: 2015-10-01

Posts: 799

Website

Re: Accidentally re-formatted boot sector :-(

First post from new install.

bl-welcome did not work blaming dated signatures for BL repos.

Running Buster now AFAIK. That up-grade process was smooth.
Still a lot of work remaining to install my favorites and setting them up.

/Martin

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"Problems worthy of attack
prove their worth by hitting back."
Piet Hein

rbh

Moderator

From: South of Lapplands inland

Registered: 2016-08-11

Posts: 1,921

Re: Accidentally re-formatted boot sector :-(

bl-welcome did not work blaming dated signatures for BL repos.

I suppose you used old isos? Not the latest helium-5-... updated in july?

You can download and install latest bunsenkeyring

# wget https://eu.pkg.bunsenlabs.org/debian/po … -2_all.deb
# dpkg -i bunsen-keyring_2019.01.19+bl9-2_all.deb

Then you can update andupgrade helium packages.

Still a lot of work remaining to install my favorites and setting them up.

It is possible from rescue-mode or rescue-cd export list of all installed packages and then import that after reinstalling.

On the other hand, its not bad to clean out...

Last edited by rbh (2019-09-12 07:45:00)

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// Regards rbh

Please read before requesting help: "Guide to getting help", "Introduction to the Bunsenlabs Lithium Desktop" and other help topics under "Help & Resources" on the BunsenLabs menu

Martin

Member

From: Stockholm, Sweden

Registered: 2015-10-01

Posts: 799

Website

Re: Accidentally re-formatted boot sector :-(

Old ISO from last December. Helium updated now.

Yes, I am not totally unhappy about the turn of events. I don't think I would have ventured to up-grade to Buster any time soon if this hadn't happened. Having said that I note that I have already found one favorite program, Veusz, is missing in Buster.

/Martin

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"Problems worthy of attack
prove their worth by hitting back."
Piet Hein