Test a Linux bare-metal restore before an emergency occurs

It is highly recommended to test a Bare-Metal Restore for each hardware platform before you need it. For example, most Data Centers have many different server platforms in use. Test the Bare-Metal Restore on each of the platforms.

h5. Make Sure You Understand How Bare-Metal Restore Works

Both Boot Methods depend on booting a "silver bullet" Linux Kernel. The Linux Kernel works on 95% of hardware without any additional settings. Sometimes, as is common for any Linux Kernel, certain hardware requires you to disable APIC (noapic) and boot with special PCI Bus options for broken hardware adapters.

If you rent a server at a remote data center, they may have already worked through problems with broken hardware or Linux Device Drivers before you get your server. Do not assume that because you rent a Centos dedicated server that it is "vanilla" Centos. It is likely it may have some special boot options to get it to run on some problematic hardware, or a tweak for some init scripts to load a Device Driver that would not play properly. The Boot CD does not know about all of these tweaks and may need additional settings.

If our Boot CD does not support your hardware, you may need to install additional drivers supplied by your Linux hardware or software vendor when Linux is already booted from CD. Live CD is based on Debian, so you can use use Debian apt-get command to install prepackaged drivers or other software. Make sure you know how to connect to your network. Also, note special accommodations used for a particular NIC adapter such as forcing a switch port to full duplex to avoid SLOW transfers.

If you test each detail before a Disaster Recovery, the process will be much smoother.