hello -

Our leased server just had a HDD crash. The datacenter has booted the box up in recovery mode for us to back-up our data in preparation for a new HDD install. Unfortunately many commands do not work.

IE. I cannot create compressed files (or even tar files) because everything is 'read-only'.

I cannot rsync or run any mysql commands because they're now 'unknown commands'.

Anyone have experience with a similar issue?? Any help/suggestions appreciated.

Ask them to put in a new drive with your os installed and attached the faulty drive (I'm assuming it's the faulty drive you're booting from?) as slave and copy whichever you can.

Or, remount the thing rw (not recommended though).

what OS are you using?

Take new HDD and install new OS on it.
after installation attache your old hdd as a secondry drive to your machine after OS load just mount and copy your data to new HDD.;)

Sorry -

OS is RH9 running Plesk 7. I will try the secondary server idea ... I just hope I don't get a bunch of Input/Output errors when trying to copy.

The switching drives and putting a new as primary is the best your going to be able to do. If you get IO errors it means there was some physical damage to the disk or some parts were corrupted.

I have a new drive to move files to > when I use ftp i get the following:

ftp> get home
local: home remote: home
local: home: Read-only file system



How do I move these 'read-only' files?

What we mean is you ask your provider to mount a new HDD and install a fresh OS into that new HDD then use that new HDD as your primary HDD which means you will be booting OS using that primary HDD. Your old/faulty HDD will be mounted as secondary HDD or at least ask your provider to do so. Then after that, use SSH to copy whichever data in your old/secondary HDD to your primary HDD... hope I am not confusing you though :p

I understood completely - however my host was unwilling to install the new HDD before I backed up my old data (guess they don't want me to have access to both HDD's).

So, I did the following:

prompt : lftp 'host'
then : user 'your login'
then it will ask your password.
and now prompt : mirror -R 'local dir' 'remote dir'

This allows me to mirror entire directories over, regardless of the 'read-only' drive settings.