I have a dumb question that's been plaguing me since I first started on this site… I apologize in advance as my thoughts are a little vague so this may not make perfect sense, but I will try to explain what I'm thinking…
We have the images available for each partition to recreate the MBWE2. Though there are a few different sizes for the MBWE2's, the first three partitions are identical in each case, would it make sense to create a file that would make it dirt simple to make a new MBWE2? I've seen many with limited experience in linux try to rescue the MBWE2's, and though it's possible with the current way, I think my way would be much easier, especially to a linux newbie…
I'm having a hard time explaining what I would like to do, so maybe a better way would be to explain my theoretical process and see if anyone can come up with any holes in it…
1) Take a fresh MBWE2, enable the SSH hack, and then delete the 4th partition completely from both drives. This will make the used space on the drive be only the beginning ~3GB of the drive, and will make our new images have SSH enabled.
2) Make a DD image of all of the sectors from the beginning of the drive all the way through the third partition. I'd assume this DD image would include the partition table, since (I think) it's stored at the beginning of the disk??
3) GZip it to make it a manageable size…
4) Optional. If we can shrink it enough, maybe make it into an ISO image that can be burned to a DVD?
5) Create a step-by-step (or even better, a script) on how to make a new MBWE2 using the images…
The thought process is that to restore a dead MBWE2, you'd simply un-gzip the images, restore them to a brand new unpartitioned drive, and manually create the 4th partition using all remaining space on the drive. No messing with boot sectors, partition tables, etc… Theoretically you wouldn't have to worry about no-boot problems either…
Also, having tinkered inside the MBWE2 myself, I know the system will boot even if the 4th partitions aren't there. So we could restore the first 3 partitions of both drives (Which would already include SSH being enabled) using the images created above, put the drives back into the MBWE2 case, boot the MBWE2, login via SSH, recreate the 4th partitions, then use the web interface to create either a RAID-0 or RAID-1 array, giving us a fresh MBWE2 quickly.
The reason for deleting the 4th partition is so that the files can be used on any sized drive, since it's the only partition that varies in size between the different sized MBWE2's…
Does this make sense?
-ET
(account deleted)
