[CentOS] External HDD query

Fri Nov 18 15:40:00 UTC 2011
Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>

On Fri, Nov 18, 2011 at 8:40 AM, Rajagopal Swaminathan
<raju.rajsand at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> You would want to format the drive with a linux filesystem, though.
>>
>
> Now, that is a typical dilemma that any sysadmin (a lowly and not so
> respected Job in India), and I can't do that that is a constraint as
> this external HDD is supposed to be connected for recovery on a
> (horror of horrors! - winx node in case the centos node fails --
> nevermind the neat li'l tar format -- coz everybody in this scenario
> is afraid of Centos. Well gimme a week. I have at least one Centos box
> [the elephant in the china shop] to fight with and turn them around :)
> )

Install VMware player on one or more of the windows boxes.  Make a
Centos image with backuppc installed and make a few copies of it.
>From there it is a couple of mouse-clicks to have Centos running with
a USB device attached to the VM guest.  I have this myself on a laptop
with one of those generic USB to IDE/SATA cable adapters for whenever
I want to access Linux-formatted disks without having to reboot into
linux.   You might even be able to use the VMware converter tool to
turn an already-installed physical machine into a VM image, but I've
had more luck doing that with windows machines because I usually
install Centos on RAID or with a custom disk layout the converter
doesn't understand.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com