Hello,
I have been unable to access my VM since the Bham shut down. Once I have logged in via Bryn it says the VM is active however if I click on the IP address the VM info does not appear. I usually work on the command line and by doing ssh ubuntu@IP address I get the following error:
ssh: connect to host 147.188.173.41 port 22: Operation timed out
Is there something I needed to do following the shut down? Really need to access my data!
Many thanks
Hayley
Hi Hayley - yes, there does appear to be something wrong with this VM, apologies.
We’re looking into it and I’ll update you ASAP.
Hi Hayley - update for you, not good news I’m afraid.
Although it looked like the VM was in an active state in Bryn, this just means that the VM has been powered-on, not that it was able to boot to the operating system.
We discovered that your VM was hanging with a disk fault before it reached the OS, which we suspected was due to a partitioning problem on the root disk (/dev/vda).
To further dig into the problem, we snapshotted the root disk and mounted it on a separate VM to find that the partition table was indeed broken. We were able to retrieve the ubuntu users’ bash_history from the broken root disk and discovered three instances of the command:
sudo fdisk /dev/vda
Which will have affected the root disk, and may have been run by accident when you were trying to partition the attached volume (/dev/vdb). Unfortunately, this mistake wouldn’tve been immediately apparent, because the VM was using the current partition table, and not the new one.
When we shut-down and then started the VMs after the shutdown at Birmingham, the VM booted using the new, broken partition table on /dev/vda, resulting in the boot hang.
The data on /dev/vda is unrecoverable, but you should be able to de-attach the volume that’s attached to this instance (/dev/vdb) using the advanced (Horizon) interface and re-attach it to a new VM. Hopefully your data are stored in the attached volume, and can be retrieved when attached to a new VM.
Please reply if there’s anything I can do to help!
Hi Matt,
Thanks so much for your help. So I’ll start by launching a new GVL - but I’m getting a message that launching servers is disabled at the locations.
Hayley
Hi Hayley - we’re full again, as ever!
I’ll send you a PM now and we can work something out…