Dead USB Thumb Drive, recovering without config backup

[rbroberts]

Sigh. I had a config backup. On my laptop whose hard drive failed last week. Creating a new backup didn't make it onto my mental list of things to do in recovering from that. I may have a copy of the config in a backup, but that would be...on the unraid server.

 

I probably could  have gotten a copy of the config directory if I had realized what a couple of other problems indicated. I first had a few commands (from the shell) tell me there were shared libs missing. After poking around a bit, I made the mistake of rebooting the server. While I got the splash screen about rebooting into my choice of modes, and it even gave me a login prompt, it didn't ask me for a password, which was wrong.

At that point, I shutdown, pulled the thumb drive to inspect it on my windows laptop. Windows pops up a file explorer window then immediately asks me to insert a disk into drive D. Plugging the thumb drive into an Ubuntu laptop generates a whole lot of nothing; it acts like it's not there.

 

I'm reading through this post

and want to find out if that's still the procedure to recovering my data and get a new key.

[rbroberts]

FWIW, the server still boots off that USB thumb drive, but I'm not sure what is there. /boot/config has a machine-id file and ssh config dir, nothing else 😞

[JorgeB]

Do you know the disk assignments and/or have/posted any recent diagnostics?

[rbroberts]

8 hours ago, JorgeB said:

Do you know the disk assignments and/or have/posted any recent diagnostics?

 

Unfortunately, not that I can find. But that did remind me, I have crashplan-pro running and checking there, I do have a backup of the config directory. I guess I forgot that I had actually planned ahead 🙂

 

But... in the other good news category, I've "discovered" the testdisk utility. After using dd to get a raw image, I've mounted the USB drive in my ubuntu laptop and was able to copy the backup boot sector onto the primary and repair the drive. There's a moderate amount of corruption. Depending on the state of my crashplan-pro backup, I may or may not lose the dockers and VMs.