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Forum Discussion
wipe and restore just / and not /data
Okay, I get that Netgear doesn't support this senerio, but all I want to do is wipe and reinstall the OS on the NAS. I do not want to wipe any data volume. This really shouldn't be all that hard, but I can almost understand why Netgear shy's away from it, but it woudl be EXCEDINGLY useful. I'm wondering if anyone as successfully worked this out. It seems like the best way to do this would be to clonezilla a fresh / partition and then lay it down on the NAS I want restored. Obviously a lot of testing will be involved. Anyone have a better idea?
Thanks.Peet
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You'd have to restore the partition to every disk, since the OS partition is mirrored on every disk. You'd also need to update the clonezilla copy every time you changed the NAS configuration.
Good to know about the partition being on all disks.
But that brings up so many questions for me ...
Are those partitions not in some sort of raid set? If not, how are they kept up-to-date among each other? Again if not, how does the boot loader decide which one boot off of? The NAS couldn't survive a disk failure if it was booted to a non-raided / and the dirive did.
Cheers.Peet
peet1 wrote:
Good to know about the partition being on all disks.
But that brings up so many questions for me ...
Are those partitions not in some sort of raid set? If not, how are they kept up-to-date among each other? Again if not, how does the boot loader decide which one boot off of? The NAS couldn't survive a disk failure if it was booted to a non-raided / and the dirive did.
The OS array is raid-1 - with every disk mirroring what is written to disk 1. I believe the boot loader (like most) as a built in sequence, and boots from the first disk it sees - usually disk 1 of course. That's why when disk 1 fails you need to sometimes remove it to get the system to boot.
Why do you want to do this?
It's not hard for us to do this, but there are good reasons why we don't provide a method for end users to do things like this. And no, cloning is not needed for doing this. Cloning would make things more complicated than they need to be.
For one thing if you wipe the root volume you are wiping all the logs. If the problem is actually with the data volume then wiping the logs may make it much harder to make a successful data recovery attempt.
The config is also wiped when you wipe the root volume and some of the config may be important.There are advantages to creating a fresh volume. There are some filesystem improvements that can only be obtained from creating a fresh volume. These are not essential, but still nice to have.
In some rare cases support at their discretion may choose to wipe the root volume.
I've got a few installs that I use as backup destinations that have 10-20 TB's of backup data. To keep my backup software happy, I've tweeked the OS more than a little. I have a changelog of virtually everything I've done, but a few of my installs are less than pristine. The data can be backed up and restored, of course, but that process can take days and requires more hardware to be deployed at remote locations. All-in-all, it's a crazy hassle. I've got one or two very-out-of-warranty boxes that I'd like to scrap and start over to make sure they're in a reproducable config.
I'd just like to be able to manage these NAS's more or less like any other server. If something gets screwed up, just wipe and re-setup the OS and leave the data intact.
With the provided tools I don't understand how I'd reinstall completly, consequently why I was thinking imaging or an rsync of a fresh install.
Thanks.Peet
If you want to experiment you should
- Verify you can access your data
- Make sure you have another copy of the data (of course there would be the primary copy on e.g. your server if the NAS is the backup destination)
- Download the logs zip file so you still have at least some information on the history since the last factory reset.
This is not something we would recommend or support doing and would have the same implications as using SSH.
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