> It was easy in VMS if we lost the operating system disk to > just pop in a new drive, and restore the OS from tape. This doesn't seem > so easy with RedHat. We are currently researching options, but I would Why would it work different in Linux? If you dd a low-level copy of the drive while it's offline, and if you later play it back to the same drive (or same type of drive), things should work. It might work under other conditions, but then it starts to depend on your configuration (grub vs lilo, etc). The best option may be hot failover, so you don't have downtime. But this requires extra hardware. The second best option might be to create a "golden" hard drive that contains your OS, then make a couple copies. If the server goes down, just plug in a drive and go. LVM, Virtualization, replication... there infinite permutations of solutions, depending on your needs. Jeremy On Wednesday 20 June 2007 5:49 pm, Michael Bruder wrote: > Hi all, > > Would any of you be willing to give me some advice on the best way to do a > bare metal recovery of Linux? The University that I work for is currently > in the beginning stages of moving an Oracle 10g installation off of a > dinosaur VMS server, and we cannot determine the best way to do a bare > metal recovery of the RedHat Enterprise 4 OS that will house the new Oracle > installation. It was easy in VMS if we lost the operating system disk to > just pop in a new drive, and restore the OS from tape. This doesn't seem > so easy with RedHat. We are currently researching options, but I would > appreciate any input. > > Thanks, > > Mike