[NTLUG:Discuss] Disaster recovery

[Peter A. Koren]

On Fri, 2005-08-12 at 04:41 -0500, Leroy Tennison wrote:
> At the risk of starting a "religious" war, what would you consider to be 
> the crucial things to document about a Linux system for the purpose of 
> disaster recovery?

The first thing I do after an install is to go into fdisk for each hard
drive and print -- to the screen from which I copy and paste into an
editor and then print on paper -- the layout details of the partitions
(start and end of cylinders included). I annotate each line with mount
points. Remember to annotate those partitions that might not have fstab
listed mount points -- the ones you might mount only occasionally with
"mkdir" and "mount". I tend to do this, because having something go
wrong on a partition -- which is not all that rare if accessed by more
than one OS -- can wreak havoc with the interplay of the BIOS, the boot
loader, and the ability to boot. 

-- Pete