Linux Raid system backup and restore
 

Hi, there
I have some problems in backup and restoring a RH 9.0 raid-1 system. The raid-1 system works great. What I am trying to do is to tar the whole system (lets call it "procduction") by using command like: # tar -czlps --same-owner --atime-preserve -f /home/backup/root0828.tgz / Then I would like to restore the tar file to another machine(let's call it "staging") with single disk.

I boot the new machine to a bootable, ungzip and untared the .tgz file to the newly created / partition (/dev/hda2 and it is mount to /mnt/root). When I tried to chroot to the /mnt/root to run lilo to make it bootable, I got Illegal instruction error.

Fyi, I usually don't have this problem for cloning non-raid system using above procedure.

Any help will be highly appreciated

My configuration:
RH 9.0 raid-1
Following are the infomations about my configuration:
-------------------------------------------------------------
uname -a
Linux Bobolink 2.4.20-8 #1 Thu Mar 13 17:54:28 EST 2003 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux
#fdisk -l

Disk /dev/hdc: 81.9 GB, 81964302336 bytes
16 heads, 63 sectors/track, 158816 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 = 516096 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hdc1 1 258 130000+ fd Linux raid autodetect
/dev/hdc2 259 2401 1080072 fd Linux raid autodetect
/dev/hdc3 2402 158816 78833160 fd Linux raid autodetect

Disk /dev/hda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 16 128488+ fd Linux raid autodetect
/dev/hda2 17 147 1052257+ fd Linux raid autodetect
/dev/hda3 148 9729 76967415 fd Linux raid autodetect

#df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/md2 75758056 26961352 44948340 38% /
/dev/md0 124323 9390 108514 8% /boot
none 256304 0 256304 0% /dev/shm

# cat /proc/mdstat
Personalities : [raid1]
read_ahead 1024 sectors
md2 : active raid1 hda3[0] hdc3[1]
76967296 blocks [2/2] [UU]

md1 : active raid1 hda2[0] hdc2[1]
1052160 blocks [2/2] [UU]

md0 : active raid1 hda1[0] hdc1[1]
128384 blocks [2/2] [UU]

unused devices: <none>

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Ron Liu
Information Technology Consultant
Biology Department
San Jose State University
408-924-4860
rliu@email.sjsu.edu

It is probably something to do with the boot sectors. Try using dd or partimage instead.