Recovery of a bootable Rachel

Hi - I’ve got a mucked up box - my fault, I’m trying to install our (Internet Archive) server on it.

I’ve also got a document “Rachel Plus Field Update Oct 4th, 2018 (rev 1.01)” with a pointer to an image for rebooting a system that is completely “bricked” (will not boot).

Ideally I’m looking for a way to do a softer recovery, for example from the net, or from an image on an external disk, because this hard recovery loses all the content which then has to be restored from the net.

@Steve, @edresor thinks you are working on better diagnostics and I wonder if this would be something to add to that. Something that could restore the OS from a bootable Rachel without trashing the content ? I’m happy to be a guinea pig.

Note - I’m leaving to Australia tomorrow, and will have significantly worse, though not terrible, internet after that point so a quick link to anything I should download while I’m still in the US on super-fast internet would be useful even if there is no time to actually work through it before Thanksgiving.

@mitra – by default, the USB stick should do a soft recovery. I’m not sure which USB image you are downloading, but the one here: http://rachelfriends.org/downloads/public_ftp/other/CAP3_RACHEL_Recovery_USB_3.0.2.img

Should do a soft recovery.

I BELIEVE, but cannot confirm at the moment, you can also open the device, remove the hard drive, and run the USB which does the “hard” recovery and then reinsert the HDD.

Depending on what caused your device to brick, this second option is quite likely to work.

Thanks - that worked, the instructions I had wer before modifying the image to do a hard recovery.

One thing that isn’t clear was what gets recovered in the soft recovery, does that recover the ubuntu as well ?

Yes, Ubuntu and the full OS should be recovered in a soft recovery if I remember correctly.

Recently, we had some problems with units not booting. This required a hard recovery because the erorr was related to the second internal hard drive corrupting so it required a hard recovery.