[dundee] Virtual machines can trash your system

Sun Aug 12 12:06:44 BST 2007

hmmm.. I'm not that religious, but remember Jesus always saves..

if you got tons of inode fsck's then that a problem...

maybe to do with geometry of the disk, or cosmic rays?

you should never really move partitions as disks....

here were you options (past tense).

make a disk image of the partion with dd, then move it over a network to your new machine, you can then mount it as a loopback filesystem.

tar ,cpio or evenbetter rsync over the network using a via netcat or something..

moving raw partions is like taking a stroll on the motorway with a blindfold on, it may impress your mates, but don't complain if you get run over.

so, if your talking about large IT networks, first thing you would do is backup files to a storage NAS, or something.. then...do work like this.

loosing your configs is a bad day, loosing data and your sacked.

I think googling for answers may not yield results, as you've gone do the wrong
path, data migration should always be done at the filesystem level, not at the raw  partition layer....

although you can have success, I took a nice ubuntu system from a p3 dell machine, and put into a p4 dell machine. after *BACKING* up, I stuck the disks in, rebooted, and hey presto..new machine!

I've never successful done that with a windows operating system past dos....

hahahahah!

If you XP machine is all in a mess, don't blame repair tools, blame XP inability to repair itself, I've managed to resucue unix machines with 50% of the root file system missing. just enough to bring the network up!!!! 

XP...reinstall..remaster..start from scratch.

hope you get your problems sorted out, sorry to sound all doom and gloom, but there may not be a solution... it's a case of you've put disel into an unleaded petrol car.

Laters,
Lee

Bruce Stewart <bruce_stewart at blueyonder.co.uk> wrote: On Saturday 11 August 2007 00:03:06 gordon dunlop wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> I am just about crying here. The story is that at long last I decided to
> upgrade my Fedora 6 to Fedora 7. I waited this long because fedora 6 is
> my default system holding all my multimedia, server, virtualisation and
> (most importantly ) my wife's document  systems.  I decided that instead
> of upgrading via YUM or the  downloaded DVD, that I should create a new
> system with the  proper partitions (that I should have done previously),
> i.e. having the operating  system spread out over three partitions;
> namely /, /home & /var where  /home  would take care of the multimedia
> and documents, and /var would take care of the server and virtualisation
> systems, comprising of 80% of the disk space. Why I did not want to do a
> direct upgrade was that I was transferring from a 32-bit system to a
> 64-bit system, so by doing a clean install of Fedora 7 whilst
> maintaining a fedora 6 system , I was going to transfer the data from
> Fedora 6 To Fedora 7 when I satisfied that everything on Fedora 7 was
> running O.K. I used a partition manager to manipulate my two SATA disks
> to create the space for the Fedora 7 partitions and moving the Fedora 6
> partition i.e. data movement. After this was done I booted into my
> Ubuntu partition, I knew GRUB on my Fedora 6 partition would not work. I
> got a fsck superblock error in Ubuntu (because the Fedora 6 partition
> had been moved), this was rectified by editing fstab to set the
> default  binary of the Fedora 6 partition to 0 0 rather than 0 2. I
> rebooted where the Fedora 6 partition was picked up by Ubuntu, and using
> the  GRUB editor  reinstalled  GRUB into my Fedora 6  partition with the
> commands:
> GRUB>  root (hd1,6)
> GRUB>  setup (hd1,6)
> GRUB> quit
> hd1,6 is the equivelant of /dev/sda7. I rebooted and  went into the
> Fedora 6 system via GAG  boot manager. The menu came up and the system
> was initiated, when it came to the file system check it went into fsck
> mode (as was expected) It took about  30 minutes  with a lead weight on
> the Y key for it to go through its routine to change the inode errors.
> It came up with at the end errors it could not correct with root inode
> not a directory. I eventually rebooted and went back into the Fedora 6
> partition where the GRUB prompt came up and I could not re-install GRUB
> due to superblock errors nor could I mount this partition from other
> Linux partitions. I was scratching my head trying to work out what was
> going on, then I realised that my Windows XP virtual machine (20GB) is a
> NTFS file of 20GB.  Here I have a file of 20GB of the NTFS file system
> within an EXT 2/3 system. This is why there were problems in correcting
> inode errors based upon the ext2/3 fsck system where the Virtual XP file
> was preventing this. The virtual Windows XP machine cannot see the file
> system of Linux (It has an Aspberger Syndrome complex where it thinks it
> is important, but it is only a lowly piece of shit within the system and
> does not understand about hierarchies). I now cannot mount the Fedora 6
> partition, nor find a way to either destroy or move this XP virtual
> machine. I have diagnostic tools, but they only deal with Linux or
> Windows file systems, not both. This brings to the conclusion that there
> will be problems in large IT environments where heterogeneous systems
> using virtualisation systems, especially in looking at Process
> Migration. So, if anyone can help me I would be very grateful, not that
> I care much for these large IT environments, it is more of how can I
> tell my wife that she cannot access her documents. Anyway no more
> googling for the answers tonight.
>
> Gordon
>
>
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The VM image is just a file, like a an OO.org Doc, or an .mpg, so it doesn't 
matter what is in the image file. So unless you have created the VM on a bare 
(filesystemless) disk, whatever fsck tool you are using should be for 
whatever filesystem the VM image file is on.
You may have a base filesystem problem, ie the disk itself is actually fracked 
or the filesystem is damaged in such a way that it is not repairable.
Or you may have a VM image problem, ie the disk image inside the VM is 
damaged, so it needs to be fixed by XP's own tools.

Bruce S.

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