Activating rescue mode on a Public Cloud instance

Learn how to restart your OVHcloud Public Cloud instance in rescue mode and access your files.

Your Public Cloud instance may become inaccessible due to a lost SSH key or configuration errors. In such circumstances, you can use the rescue mode to reconfigure your instance or to recover your data.

Requirements

• A Public Cloud instance in your OVHcloud account
• Access to the OVHcloud Control Panel

Instructions

Step 1: Activating rescue mode

From the OVHcloud Control Panel:

1. Click Public Cloud from the top navigation bar.
2. Select Instances from the left-hand menu.
3. Select the more options ... button to the right of your instance.
4. Select Reboot in rescue mode.

You will now see the Reboot in rescue mode dialog box. Click the drop-down list to select the distribution you would like to use in rescue mode and then click the Restart button.

Once your instance has been rebooted in rescue mode, an information box will display the options to access it.

Your temporary rescue mode password will only be shown in the VNC console. Click on your instance, then switch to the tab VNC console to retrieve it.

Step 2: Accessing your data

When rescue mode has been activated, your instance's data will be attached as an additional disk. You will now need to mount it, by taking the following steps.

First, establish an SSH connection to your instance. Once you are connected, verify the available disks with this command:

lsblk

The result will look similar to the following:

NAME    MAJ:MIN RM  SIZE  RO TYPE  MOUNTPOINT
sda     253:0   0     1G  0  disk
└─sda1  253:1   0  1023M  0  part  /
sdb     253:16  0    10G  0  disk
└─sdb1  253:17  0    10G  0  part

In rescue mode, sda is the rescue mode disk and sda1 is the primary rescue partition mounted on /.

In this example, the primary disk is sdb and the system partition is sdb1 (indicated by the larger size).

Next, mount the partition:

mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/

Your data will now be accessible from the /mnt folder.

Step 3: Deactivating rescue mode

Once you have completed your tasks, you can deactivate rescue mode by rebooting your instance from the Control Panel interface. To execute this, click the more options ... button and select Exit rescue mode.

Activating rescue mode using the OpenStack API

You can also activate rescue mode via the OpenStack API using the following command:

nova rescue <INSTANCE_ID>

To exit rescue mode, use the following command:

nova unrescue <INSTANCE_ID>

Go further

For more information and tutorials, please see our other Public Cloud support guides or explore the guides for other OVHcloud products and services.