How to use rescue mode on Elastic Metal servers

Reviewed on 22 December 2023 • Published on 26 May 2021

Note

This documentation concerns rescue mode for Elastic Metal servers. To use rescue mode on Instances, refer to the corresponding documentation.

Rescue mode allows you to boot an Elastic Metal server from the network. It downloads a rescue operating system based on Ubuntu Linux that runs completely in the server RAM. This allows you to perform maintenance and data recovery operations, even if the machine is unreachable in normal mode.

Before you start

To complete the actions presented below, you must have:

A Scaleway account logged into the console
Owner status or IAM permissions allowing you to perform actions in the intended Organization
An SSH key
An Elastic Metal server installed

Click Elastic Metal in the Bare Metal section of the Scaleway console side menu. The Elastic Metal dashboard displays.
Choose the server you want to reboot into rescue mode from the list. Click its name to display that server’s information page.
Scroll down to the Rescue mode section.
Click Boot in rescue mode to reboot the server into rescue mode:

The server starts to reboot into rescue mode.

Note
Depending on the hardware model of the machine, the reboot may take several minutes.
Once rebooted, use a terminal application to log into the machine using SSH with the user account root:
```
ssh root@<elastic-metal-server>
```
Tip
Rescue mode uses the SSH keys registered for your Elastic Metal server as an authentication method. If you have lost your private key, you can access your server using the credentials displayed in the console:

You are now logged into rescue mode and able to perform maintenance actions on the machine. The rescue mode is based on Ubuntu Bionic Beaver (18.04), and you can run commands as on any Ubuntu Linux machine.

Tip

Rescue mode runs completely in the RAM of the server. To access files located on the hard disk, it needs to be mounted. The disk can be mounted automatically by running mountall.sh

How to reboot into normal mode

Once the maintenance of the machine is completed, it can be rebooted back into the operating system installed on the hard disk of the server.

To reboot the server into normal mode, click Switch to normal mode in the rescue mode section of the server’s details. The server reboots on the installed system and will be available in normal mode within a few minutes.