Best Distro for HDD software

Hey,

Looking to setup a dedicated machine to handle data recovery and disk cloning at the office.

I will be retiring an old Ath64 based server and want to use it for backing up, recovering and cloning HPUX 10.2 systems.

I have an adaptec AHA-2940 Ultra SCSI card I will be installing.

http://www.adaptec.com/en-us/support/scsi/2940/aha-2940/

It does not show a download for drivers for Linux however it is caveatted that only OSes that do not include the driver already are listed below.


File system is I believe HFS (not Mac HFS+) I already borked a drive trying to clone it from within windows (I made the stupid mistake of initializing the disk in disk manager) so my first priority will be to do a data recovery.


Run from USB is a last resort but will do that If I have to.


GUI is preferred to CLI but if the best option is CLI I will just need links on how to perform the tasks I want to.

Thanks!

Old Norton ghost will image any drive the host machine can see, regardless of OS installed on it. I can do a forensic image even if you want. I have a machine that boot to XP for Data recovery, with removeable SATA and IDE trays for hosted drives. When I want to image, I boot to the Norton Ghost disc and image to either a larger, secondary drive installed in the system (For multiple deployments) or another drive (for cloning). I have used GetBackData Fat and NTFS. It was $180 for both versions and I get free lifetime updates.

I have a paid version of Terabyte imaging software. It is also a bare metal clone but IIRC does not work correctly with the SCSI card.

I already have software for recovery but like yours it only works on FAT/NTFS.

I do not need to recover entire drive, as we have an operating version of HPUX that is more fully configured I can clone, I just need to be able to pull all the *.S70 and *.ASC files off of it. Being UNIX everything is case sensitive, but since these are not OS files, that should not be too important, still, having everything named .S70 not .s70 would save me a few minutes work.

The recovery software will be a one time deal. I goofed, but have setup an NFS share on the server that will be running backups to a hidden drive periodically, I just need to add the exported file system on the Unix box.

systemrescuecd is pretty good, comes with everything you could need.

I did more research and it seems that HP's HFS (HiPerformance File System) which is not to be confused with HFS (Hierarchial File System) or HPFS (High Performance File System) is entirely proprietary, the only rescue software that I could find that worked costs $699 (Stellar Phoenix for HP unix). I did try other softwares (system rescue CD would not boot) but found some good ones that would let me see previous files on the hdd, someone had originally used the drive in BTTV box).

I thought if I could find a software that could handle VxFS it might be able to handle HFS as well, because it is also an offshoot of UFS but as a JFS type instead.

So gave up on that and am learning how to map in Sitecomp to rebuild the one file we need.

I will still be using it for Cloning but do not need a whole system for that, just a USB stick.

Thanks for the help!

what about Helix?


the feds use that for forensic recovery to my knowledge. atleast our narcotics guy does for the local PD when he does his work.

Gave up on the recovery, will just be rebuilding later and as soon as I can get CentOS installed will work on a daily NFS backup.


Been working on a USB install for the last 4 hours.

Tried 3 different USB installer apps, tried full bootable and NETINSTALL

Full bootable works up to a point it failed finding repodat/xxxxxxxxxx So I opened the file with the repo listings and corrected the file names. (It dropped everything after a hyphen or a period.)

Now it fails to "mount image" which is ridiculous because the flash drive is formatted FAT32 because it was the only supported format (available to windows) and it has a 4GB file limit so the DVD was extracted to the drive. Why is it looking for an image?????

Tried netinstall and networkmanager fails

Going to try and check out liveCD method via USB and see if there is a full install option there.

Hopefully I will not have to drive to the 20th century and get some optical disks.


EDIT: Wait, NFS was an option when the repodata files were incorrectly named, so perhaps screwing them up again I can do a networkinstall from the full boot stick.. going to try that first

Update: Used a Live Mint distro to dd the ISO to a USB stick and that worked perfectly.