P2V Linux Box without Root

[Steve21]

Morning All,

 

Is there any snazzy way of being able to P2V an old Linux server when you don't have root access to it?

 

Bit worried about an old server dying, and was hoping to get it onto a VM so can backup etc, but can't logon as root to use DD etc, and as it's a linux raid disk can't seem to use a live disc eg. Ubuntu to mount it under either.

 

Thanks,

Steve

[Geoff]

Does SystemRescueCD not understand?

 

SystemRescueCd

 

Do you have access to the bootloader?

[Steve21]

Will give the rescueCD a shot, hopefully it'll be smarter than Ubuntu haha

 

Aye I can access the GRUB menu etc.

 

Steve

[Steve21]

Well it's showing the drives which is a better start

 

Looks like dual drives that are pretty much just one virtual array.

 

@Geoff Is that likely to mean I'm gonna need to effectively have space for all 6 drives on P2V image? Or any idea how that would work lol

 

Thanks,

Steve

[Geoff]

If you can get to grub, try booting in single user mode (add 'single' to the end of the boot command line)

 

You have two 1TB physical drives. Each has a swap partition and 4 raid volumes. It looks like your data is actually on an LVM volume on the Software RAID. If you can establish which is the root partition (I'm guessing the 900+GB LVM partition) you can mount and boot SystemRescueCD and change the root password.

 

As far as P2V, you'd need 2 x 1TB virtual disks as that's what you physically have.