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CHAPTER 20 BareMetal (ParaChute 2000) Disaster Recovery
20.1 Introduction
The ParaChute 2000 is a fast, efficient product for recovering your system from a full crash. its primary function is to back up your root hard disk, verify it, and later restore this when you crash. ParaChute 2000 is a fully features bare metal recovery product.
20.2 Supported Operating Systems
· Windows 3.1
· Windows 95
· Windows 98
· Windows ME
· Windows NT (including registry)
· Windows 2000 (including registry)
· Windows XP (including registry)
· Free BSD
· SCO Open Server 5
· SCO Unixware 7
· Caldera Open Unix 8
· Novell 3.x, 4.x, 5.x (including bindery)
· United Linux
· Red Hat 6.x, 7.x
· Linux (Mandrake, SuSE, Stormix, other flavors)
Supports both LILO and GRUB boot strap loaders
20.2.1 Installation
If you received this product via mail, you should have received a single diskette. This diskette (labeled ParaChute 2000) contains the ParaChute 2000 menu system and necessary drivers including tape to perform the Bare Metal Recovery and Bare Metal Backups.
20.3 Features
· Bare Metal Restore
· Backup and restore to tape, zip, hard-disk file
· Bit-level verification
· Software compression (use if tape does not provide hardware compression)
· After the fact verification (can re-verify tape months later)
· Backup multi-boot systems (each operating system is backed up)
· Backs up and recovers root disk only.
20.4 Using ParaChute 2000
If you received a CD-ROM with your package, you must insert this in the CD-ROM drive. ParaChute 2000 assumes your CD-ROM drive is set to boot if there is a bootable CD in the drive.
If you did not receive a CD-ROM, you can use a Red Hat 7.2 installation CD. These can be obtained from a variety of sources. If you decide to download it from the Internet, we suggest you use one of the alternate sites as these are fast and reliable.
At the boot prompt, type "linux rescue". This causes the CD-ROM to boot into rescue mode which allows you to fully take over the hardware and either backup or recover the system.
As the system boots, a prompt asking for your language will appear, please choose your appropriate language.
You will also be prompted to enter the anaconda rescue program, choose the skip button. You should now be at the Linux shell.
Place the UniTrends ParaChute 2000 diskette into the floppy drive.
mount /dev/fd0 /mount giving you access to the floppy.
then type /mount/install to start the ParaChute 2000 menu system. You can follow instructions on the screen to perform either a backup, verify or restore. All options are self explanatory and there is online help if needed.
For backup of a Linux system, we suggest you exclude the swap partition. This partition has scrap data and is not needed for a complete recovery.
20.5 Evaluation Version
The evaluation version does not perform a restore when you select the restore choice. Instead, it performs a bit-level verification of all data which simulates a restore. Any discrepancies are noted.
There is no way to convert an evaluation version to a live version. However, if you purchase the live version, you can restore the data created with the evaluation version.
20.6 Advanced Issues
Hardware problems - any questions as to recognized hardware should refer to the message file located under the /var directory. this file will list all information on the system configuration that you will need for trouble shooting. Also, the lsdev command is available to list the current hardware your system is able to see.
Backing up to alternative drives - the ParaChute 2000 product is not locked into tape specific backups. We allow the user to back up the system onto many different types of media, such as Zip Drives, Jazz Drives, Hard Drives and RAID Arrays. During backup you will be asked to specify where you would like to backup.
Backing up to Hard Drive (raw or partition) - If you want to backup your drive to another hard drive, this option is open to you. You can backup to a raw partition such as /dev/hbd, second IDE hard drive or to a partition such as /dev/hda which will backup the first partition of the primary hard drive. Note that these methods above will wipe any information on those partitions or raw drives out. As an alternative, you can back up to a file on one of the existing partitions. All you have to do is mount the partition onto the system before starting the Menu system. By typing mount /dev/hbd1 /mnt/Backup this will allow you to backup what you need to the secondary hard drive on partition one. This of course assumes that a valid partition exists there and that the system can read it's type ID. The -t <file system type> can be added to the mount command allowing you to specify the partition type manually. this may be needed on some partitions. For more information, please refer to the documentation on the Linux mount command.
Backing up to a Zip drive - If a zip drive is connected to the system, the drivers will be loaded for it. It will be treated like a SCSI drive attached to the system. If you already have a SCSI hard Drive connected to the system, you can go into the /proc/scsi/ directory to find out the drive number so you can access it. Note that disks that are locked or that have password protection will be inaccessible by the system. these should be shut off before trying to access the zip disk.
New hard disk is larger than old disk - once you have restored, you can use Partition Magic to expand the partitions to a larger size. Also, some freeware may be available to help with this depending on the operating system you are using. one example is FIPS.
Open files - ParaChute 2000 will backup and recover all open files on your computer.
Databases - If you have a database residing on the primary root disk, this is backed up in its entirety and is fully recovered.
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