One of my three hard-disks died overnight in my Fedora machine. When I started the PC today it did not boot and since it seems that large parts of the kernel were located on the disk there appears to be no way to get it work. Moreover, as data is distributed via LVM across all three disks, I can’t use the other two as well. I have tried several options, but I think the most straightforward way will be to do a fresh installation with a new disk and try to mount the other two ones somehow. At least this gives me the chance to switch over to Fedora 12. Although GPU programming might not work, I think its better to switch to F12 and if possible to the GPU stuff on another (dedicated) machine.
Popularity: 8%
If you have important data, a safer way to protect it is to use RAID arrays of disks (raid5 if you have 3 disk is a good solution). It is not 100% safe in the sense that all your data is still located at one place, so if there is a fire or so, you loose it all. The only “really safe” option is to backup to a remote place regularly (rsync, unison, …)
About your specific needs, if your hardware supports virtualization, I recommend using a virtual machine with the dedicated environment (example: virtualbox-ose). The perfs are not bad, and the flexibility is great! Feel free to ask if you are interested
My 2 cents
I appreciate your comments a lot. I am rather using all that stuff, than really understanding all details. So here’s what I basically want. I have three (now only two as one is dead) HDs, whereas each of them is 750 GB in size. I expect the OS to sit in the usual directories and all my code will reside in /home/hobiger.
That’s it. Data, should be located in /data whereas I don’t mind if I loose it or not as most of it is binary observation data which is soon overwritten when new experiments take place. So I am now thinking of a simple configuration just putting the OS and my home directory on one disk and all the data on the others (2nd). I am using an external USB HD for monthly backups via rsync which fetches the content of my home directory, so that at least all my code and emails are somewhat considered. I think I will do the fresh install of F12 in the afternoon, forcing an installation w.o. LVM to avoid that data gets split over different physical drives.
Sorry, my comment about virtual machine was targeted to the GPU stuff you mention, but since it is highly dependent on hardware virtual machine is probably not good idea
For the configuration you desribe, I would advise:
- RAID 1 (mirroring) for your system and home directory, for reliability (recovery in case of HDD crash)
- RAID 0 for your data, to get speed and space.
But I don’t know if your hardware supports RAID arrays? You can also do it with software RAID, but I believe the performances are not as good.
BTW, a “small” SSD could be an interesting alternative to replace your crashed HDD. for example 128GB SSD for your system and home directory should be good, right? Then traditional HDD for your data.
My 2 cents ^^
Thanks for the hint on the SSD. This morning I received an email from a colleague who mentioned that the SSD in his laptop as a very good alternative. Maybe I should check the price for such a device in 価格.com as it might help me to reduce headaches caused by computer troubles …