Data Loss in Linux While Converting to Virtual Disk

A virtual disk is a disk with some characteristics of the general hard drive, in actual it is the emulation of a hard drive where a traditional Linux file system exists on physical disk partition.

Because the virtual disk offers more flexibility of data storage than the divisions, users consider converting all their file system divisions to the virtual disks. After converting divisions to virtual disk, you can access them only via virtual disk nodes.

To migrate to a virtual disk from system based divisions, unmount your Linux file system on the division that you want to convert. Then create simple virtual disk for every division with the help of Virtual Disk Manager. Allocate divisions to virtual disks. The divisions would be removed automatically once the virtual disks are assigned to them.

When the Linux file system is in the simple virtual disk pattern, migration to another array pattern could be wrong without making the drive offline. Always make sure that the divisions are not accessed during migration process.

To simply convert file system divisions to virtual disk we need to follow the following steps:

? Unmount the file system on divisions, which you wish to convert

? For every disk division, choose New from Disk menu, insert a simple virtual disk and allocate divisions to virtual disk. It overlays every division with simple virtual disk.

? For every disk division, choose Modify from Disk Menu and migrate simple virtual disk to desired RAID* type.

? Use File System Manager for updating the information of mounted file system. Replace the divvy** device nodes of file system with their virtual disk ones.

In this way, you easily convert your hard drive to a virtual disk and can take benefit of greater flexibility and improved performance. But if the conversion process gets interrupted by any of the reasons like sudden power failure, irresponsive operating system, operating system crash, unexpected system shutdown or restart because of already mounted volume etc. we may face critical problems of data loss.

Not all Linux systems are licensed to use Virtual Disk Manager. Unfortunately, if your system isn’t licensed and you are trying to convert your partitions, Virtual Disk Manager exits with some error messages.

All these situations put you in trouble of data loss and you need to perform Linux Recovery to overcome this problem. The Data recovery in Linux can easily be achieved using third party applications, known as Linux data recovery software. Linux data recovery software are particularly designed to meet recovery requirements of all Linux users.

Stellar Phoenix Linux Data Recovery software is a trusted Linux recovery tool, which efficiently recovers your lost, missing and inaccessible data from Ext2, Ext3 and ReiserFS file systems based hard drives. It supports recovery from all the Linux distributions. Stellar Phoenix Linux Data Recovery has a simple and user-friendly interface, which allows us to have ‘Do It Yourself’ data recovery in Linux.