December 13, 201015 yr This is a suggestion for the distant future, as there are currently enough things for LimeTech to address (unRAID 5.0, 4k sectors, 3 TB drives, etc.). Currently you can take any data drive out of an unRAID array and mount it into any system that has the appropriate drivers (many Linux flavors, and Windows if the ReiserFS drivers are installed manually). This allows for what I call 'worst case scenario data recovery'. What if as part of the formatting process each data drive was loaded with some tiny bootable OS (maybe a Linux equivalent of TinyXP). Then, in a worst case scenario, you could simply boot from each data disk and recover the data there-within, no need to rely on special drivers or another OS. The obvious issue with this is that if the boot order was reset on an unRAID server, the server would likely boot from one of the data disks instead of the flash drive. This is easy to fix, but still an issue.
December 13, 201015 yr grub4dos can be installed into the boot sector. It can read a /boot/grub/menu.lst file and boot unraid from the disk or any other OS that can be booted from grub via local or ramdisk image. grub4dos's benefit is that it can read a reiserfs filesystem directoy. If you rsync /boot to each of your data drives as a backup, then install grub4dos on each reiserfs disk, you can do an emergency boot from the hard drive. The downside of this... /boot is replicated on mutliple disks so shfs will complain if you do any scans of the filesystem.
December 13, 201015 yr Then, in a worst case scenario, you could simply boot from each data disk and recover the data there-within, no need to rely on special drivers or another OS. Uhhh... if you don't have another system to recover the data TO, then you can't recover it. So just mount the drive on that other system. Problem solved.
December 13, 201015 yr grub4dos can be installed into the boot sector. I'm not sure the disk will be recognized as a valid unRAID disk if the first 446 bytes of the MBR has anything but zeros in it.
December 13, 201015 yr Author Then, in a worst case scenario, you could simply boot from each data disk and recover the data there-within, no need to rely on special drivers or another OS. Uhhh... if you don't have another system to recover the data TO, then you can't recover it. So just mount the drive on that other system. Problem solved. Well, I was thinking that you could mount an external drive to TinyLinux (or whatever), or maybe transfer data over the network. So it would also have to have drivers for NTFS, Fat32, HFS+, etc. I'm imagining a customized OS that has as many file system drivers as possible to make data recovery as easy as possible. This would also allow you to boot the TinyOS on the unRAID server hardware itself, in case you don't have another desktop computer to work with. Many people have an unRAID server and a laptop or HTPC, but no desktop. That would make it pretty difficult to mount a data drive... Another idea would be to have such a bootable OS ready to go on a CD or DVD (like BartPE). I suppose this is already possible with certain flavors of Linux, but I don't know which ones do and do not have ReiserFS built in. Does anyone know? This would also require that the unRAID server has a CD/DVD drive if that hardware were to be used.
December 14, 201015 yr Rajahal, Take a look at SystemRescueCd. http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page It should be able to do what you're looking for. And it's bootable from a USB key.
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