Save data from a Virtual Hard drive

[stavros141]

Hello everyone

I am facing a problem that I have never encountered before and googling around just isn't helping.

I was assigned to migrate a pmWiki server to a new MediaWiki server which was supposed to run as a
virtual machine on a Red Hat Cluster Suite. My coworker and I had to copy paste almost 2000+ articles.
During the migration my coworker decided to make a backup script with which he effectively deleted the
libc library and many other important data. We copied the image of the Hard Drive in order to extract the
database of our wiki but we are unable to find a way to do it. We also managed to copy the database (not a dump)
but we were unable to migrate it to the Newly installed MySql.

Has anyone encountered this problem before? And if yes please share any suggestions on the subject

thank you in advance

[rubberman]

Unfortunately, your description isn't too clear. You say you have the original database (with 2000+ articles), but you munged the virtual machine you wanted to install it on? You will need to reinstall the operating system on the VM. If that is where the data resides, then you need to boot a recovery OS, mount the file system where it resides, and then copy it to another device/media before you reinstall the OS. Clear as mud, right? :-)

[stavros141]

No the data was already installed locally on the VM we only managed to save the actuall database which was in /var/lib/mysql without having a dump to restore from. We reinstalled the OS and PHP, Apache, etc and tried to copy the database into the new mysql directory. I know it sounds dumb but the only commands we could still use when the system broke was cp and ls. So we didn't have many choices. We also copied the image of the hard drive but we couldn't read it