Advice on restoring system?

[Zembower, Kevin]

I'd like to ask the list's advice regarding restoring a failed system. Just before I went on vacation, an old PE 2450 failed. This was a prototyping and testing system. It only had two partitions, / and /boot. I was able to restore both / and /boot to another host,'t', under the directory /td/.

Now, I've resurrected the server, and would like to transfer everything back to it from the other server. While the PE 2450 'td' server was down, the developers continued working on the /td/ files on the second server, so I need to restore these files, and not just the files from the original backup.

My first attempt was to boot the 'td' server using Knoppix 5.1.1, mount the original hard disk as /media/sda1 and use something like "cd /media/sda1; ssh t 'cd /td; tar -czf - ' | tar -pxz" as root on the 'td' server. However, I couldn't mount the disk Knoppix found as sda1. It said something about corrupt or bad superblocks. I specified that this partition is ext3, but it didn't help. When I boot this server under CentOS5, which is the distribution that the 'td' server originally had, the hard disk that stored / was identified as /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00 with type ext3. Can anyone let me know if there's a way to make this procedure work, or what I'm doing wrong?

My other thought was to install the latest version of CentOS5 on the sever 'td' and try something like "cd /; ssh t 'cd /td; tar -czf - ' | tar -pxz" as root on the 'td' server. However, I thought of two potential problems: failure to overwrite files that might be open on the 'td' server, and failure to erase directories and files that might exist on the 'td' server now, but that didn't exist when the backup of the 'td' server was made before the original failure. Can anyone offer any advice on this procedure?

Thanks in advice for your advice and suggestions. I appreciate your thoughts on my problem.

-Kevin

Kevin Zembower
Internet Services Group manager
Center for Communication Programs
Bloomberg School of Public Health
Johns Hopkins University
111 Market Place, Suite 310
Baltimore, Maryland  21202
410-659-6139