In moodle the LMS you can export courses, as a tar.gz, some one said they were going to give me such a thing. I was suprised by the 6 gb size. I was even more suprised when I extracted it, and found the root directory to be the root of the server. The person giving me the course instead of exporting must have just tarred the entire server!!
How should I go about recovering this? Is there anyway to start this up in a virtual machine? I have a whole linux server, what to do? I could probably just hand pick the data files I need, but how to access a mysql database with out running mysql?
I am so stumped!
Ok, the tar file is not going to give you much. Unless you can find a mysql db dump in there somewhere. MySQL does not like it when you backup the data directory unless you stop the server first. Even then its not a good way to backup the db's. Can you ask this person for a proper dump? I would highly suggest not attempting to restore the binary databases if you can help it.
Although Josh has the better answer, in case you aren't able to get the proper MySQL dump you can restore the server using a complete tar of the filesystem. You could create a virtual machine with the same filesystem, extract the tar onto it, and then install grub. You might have to fight with grub a little to boot it, but I've had success doing this in the past. After it boots, as Josh said, there is a good chance MySQL won't start, or will have issues you have to work out, but you may be able to get it running and take a dump from that. Again, that should only be a last resort case if you can't get the proper dump file.