Today I booted my bloody windows box and 3 partitions were missing, and I had a pretty bad Virus infection. Booting windows in safe mode i could remove the entries made to my system from the trojan and scan the systems folders for more trojans with ClamWin open source anti-virus software.

Problem 2 was a bit easier as I had already dealt with ‘deleted’ partitions before. Booting from the floppy and searching for the missing partitions was not too hard.

After two hours of misery, the machine is working again. I swear this is the last Windows box I’ll ever buy. I’ll probably replace it with a MacMini when the new version comes out.

(click on the full screen button on the lower right of the movie player)

If this is how future user interfaces will look like, i want one!

Only the IDE drive crashed so my important files were safe, but I needed to remount the raid array. It took me quite a while before I got that right, so I’ll share my knowledge here for you. Here are the commands needed to reconstruct / remount a raid array with a Gentoo live cd:

load the raid module and lvm driver if you need to:

# modprobe raid5
# modprobe dm-mod

Find the UUID’s of the devices

( you can skip this step if you have a backup of your /etc/mdadm.conf file )

# mdadm --examine --scan /dev/sda1

Where /dev/sda1 points to one of the partitions used for the raid array. The output looks like this on my box:

ARRAY /dev/md1 level=raid5 num-devices=4 UUID=94366f38:ccdadda0:06f85cb1:f1263d52

copy it to /etc/mdadm.conf

# mdadm --examine --scan /dev/sda1 >> /etc/mdadm.conf

Now we need to add a list of devices to mdadm.conf of where to look for member disks:

(manually add this to mdadm.conf, the devices i had to add where /dev/sda1 to /dev/sdd1)

DEVICE /dev/sd[abcd]1

At the end that leaves us with this in our mdadm.conf file:

DEVICE /dev/sd[abcd]1
ARRAY /dev/md1 level=raid5 num-devices=4 UUID=94366f38:ccdadda0:06f85cb1:f1263d52

Assemble the raid array

We make the mirror device node:

# mknod /dev/md1 b 9 1

Assemble the array:

# mdadm --assemble --scan

You can check /proc/mdstat to see if the array is online:

# cat /proc/mdstat
Personalities : [raid0] [raid1] [raid6] [raid5] [raid4] [raid10]
md1 : active raid5 sda1[0] sdd1[3] sdc1[2] sdb1[1]
937705728 blocks level 5, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [4/4] [UUUU]

Activate the logical volumes

# vgscan

Scans your disk and should show you the Volume Group that was on the raid array and add it to the lvm database

# vgchange -ay

This should activate the volumes and auto create the nodes in /dev

Mount the filesystems

I just needed to mount the filesystems just like I would mount a regular one:

mount --type ext3 /dev/vg2/var /mnt/gentoo/var

Hope this helps someone!

The wikipedia entry for the LHC has plenty of extra information.

The installation went easier than I thought. Except, as you might have guessed from this post’s title, something did go wrong with the fonts.

I started by copying the old drive to an external usb drive with SuperDuper (a highly recommended freemium backup app) . Next I switched the old and new drive. Apple has this pdf with instructions. Not mentioned in the instructions is the fact that you need a Torx T-7 screwdriver to unscrew the harddrive case.

To my surprise booting from the usb drive was a non-issue. As long as you’ve formatted the drive to be an Intel-mac bootable drive (In the Disk utility under the options button, choose GUID) it automatically boots from it if there is no other bootdisk. I used SuperDuper again to copy the external drive to the new harddisk. Great, still no errors!

One more reboot (now booting from the internal drive) and I would be ready.

The first thing that I noticed was that some icons in my dock had been replaced by folder icons and the links were pointing to a bunch of header files. Not a big deal, just replace the icons by dragging them from the applications folder.

I started to check if everything was still there, opened LightRoom and iTunes and saw all was OK. But when I opened a TextMate project I noticed the fonts were different. The font I normally use when programming is Anonymous, and it had apparently vanished from my system. Reinstalling the font didn’t work. Lots of fonts were missing in the Fontbook.

The solution to this problem is the font-cache. I don’t really understand this yet, but apparently you need to clean the cache and let your system rebuild it. Great, how do I do this? Well it seems Mark Douma created a small app just for this: Font Finagler. Just run it and click ‘Clean Font Cache’ (you can do this for free 10 times) . A reboot later and you’re all done!

I haven’t found any other problems since I migrated to the new disk. I like the increase in speed (the standard drive is a 5400rpm one) and capacity.

Just thought I’d blog about this issue as I couldn’t find it described anywhere else on the internet.