Something horrible happens: the Linux system no longer boots up. Causes can be our own exploring curiosity, a hardware failure or a friend or co-worker. LinuxRecovery.net is here to help you bring back your precious data or functionality of your Linux machine; when you can no longer access valuable data and services that our hitherto always available Linux system used to provide. Our intended audience is fledgling administrators, but we might have a trick or two for the old school guru as well.
The first task is simple: determine what you want to bring back. Generally this means restoring the ability to get to a shell prompt, all file systems mounted and network connectivity restored. This functionality is usually provided by runlevel 3. For more information on runlevels, read man page for init, section 8 (shorthand is man:init(8)). The more specific the recovery goal, the simpler our planning. We’ll walk through diagnosing the problem, some specific fixes, and refer to documentation for additional information.
Recovering any system to full and proper functioning is not required in many instances. If the jewel to be recovered is data in a directory or on a partition, booting to another operating system (on floppy disk or hard drive) and copying the data may be all that is required for minimal system recovery. System recovery may be recovering data, normal booting, network access, a specific application or user data. If your user data (/home) is on a separate partition, reinstalling Linux and losing the system configuration may be the fastest method of restoring user data. Since Linux has more advanced techniques for system recovery beyond reinstalling the operating system, we’ll walk through common disaster recovery techniques. Following are some of the more common disasters and how we recovered from them.