[H-GEN] Bootable Linux distro, partition backup/restore

Tony Nugent tony at linuxworks.com.au
Thu Mar 20 01:09:31 EST 2003


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On Thu Mar 20 2003 at 14:08, Mark Suter wrote:

> Hilton,
> 
> > I recently came across a CD-based bootable Linux distro (not
> > Knoppix) that allowed you to backup and restore partitions
> > across a network - a-la Symantec Ghost.

I realise that you say "not knoppix", but only last weekend I used
knoppix (in runlevel 2, text mode only) to do a backup and restore
(effectively a backup and "transplant") from a one hard drive to
another box over a network:
  - dhcpd server running to get auto-network configuration at bootup
  - mount nfs exports from another box (could also use partimaged)
  - partimage to save what I needed and then put things back again
  - parted to create, re-size and re-arrange the partitions how I
    wanted.

Along the way I even managed to save a 2Gb bootable win fat32
partition and restore back as a 4Gb partition - it worked perfectly
once the bootloader was installed and things were booting correctly.

So what's the specific problem with using knoppix?

  The only hassle I did run into was that knoppix appears to use a
  newer version of e2fsprogs that has some incompatabilities...
  partitions that I had reformated with its mke2fs util where done
  in a way that that made the older version in my rh73 install
  complain bitterly (eg, e2fsck would refuse to run on reboot due to
  "unsupported flags" used on the filesystem).

> You probably saw some slick, polished tool; however, this sort of
> thing is possible with the www.lnx-bbc.org bootable business card
> CDs (think tar/rsync over ssh).

There is a whole bunch of bootable linux isos available, it has
suprised me how many I've seen.  However I don't recall any that
have been specifically designed for using as a ghost-like utility,
and I suspect that just about all of them have the tools do do this
anyway.

But don't limit yourself to a cdrom image: it wouldn't require more
than a floppy rescue/bootdisk that included a collection of basic
utils and drivers, parted, partimage and the necessary networking
tools to create such a thing, and surely someone has done that
already :)

I must admit though, parted and partimage don't seem to be very
"polished" tools -- although they certainly seem to work quite well.
For sure they require some preliminary reading and practice to get
the idea of how to use them... for example, resizing a fat32
filestystem from 2->4Gb was a troublesome process since parted
wanted parameters specified in Mb rather than as disk block counts
(which would have been more logical and useful to use in conjunction
with the information fdisk gives you).  I had do some on-the-spot
conversions from block sizes to Mb - made easier thanks to bash's
quick'n'dirty $[expr] function :)

> Yours sincerely,
> 
> - -- Mark John Suter  | I know that you  believe  you understand

Cheers
Tony

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