Hi;

I have had to rebuild my hard drive more then a few times.

I am thinking about stratedgies to avoid doing all that work.

Is it possible to ghost a linux installation?

What would I need.

Just curious

Steve

On 5 Dec 2003 18:59:45 -0800, Steve staggered into the Black Sun and
said:
Regular backups, eh?

Backup utilities for Unix-like systems have been around since the
mid-70s. You can tar and bzip2 an entire system onto one or more tapes,
then boot from something like Tom's or Knoppix and restore those tapes
onto the disk, re-run GRUB or LILO, reboot, and everything's cool.

Interrogative sentences in written English generally require a "?" at
the end, no? http://www.partimage.org/ might be "friendlier" if you're
not confident of your ability to use the tar/tape/rescue system route.

--
Matt G|There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see
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i assume you don't mean at the nuts & bolts level...?

that would be alot of work!

what do you mean by ghost?


lemme see if i can guess what you want...
do you mean to build a base system
then tar/bzip2 it all up,
and when your disk dies, just stick the cd in and unbzip2/tar it onto the
fixed disk?

be more specific.

Here in comp.os.linux.misc,
stevesusenet@yahoo.com (Steve) spake unto us, saying:

Do you mean create a backup image of a partition?

Or do you mean literally use the "Ghost" product?

I know that DriveImage (a similar product from PowerQuest) can backup
and restore a partition regardless of the filesystem being used. It
can use the filesystem internals to make more efficient backups if it
knows about the filesystem, but that isn't required.

Can't speak for Ghost itself.

As others have said, free tools to do that sort of thing exist in Linux
already -- the "dd" command is one such tool.

--
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OS/2 + eCS + Linux + Win95 + DOS + PC/GEOS + Executor = PC Hobbyist Heaven!
Applications analyst/designer/developer (14 yrs) seeking employment.
See web site above for resume/CV and background.

Steve wrote:
If by that you mean using Norton Ghost to copy a Linux installation from
one hard drive to another, the answer is yes. Norton Ghost supports the
ext2/ext3 file systems, but if you're using something else (like
ReiserFS), it won't work.

Steve wrote:
of my linux partition which are on a ReiserFS and Ext3 partition. No
problems at all.

Steve wrote:
Wow! I sure hope you did in in a clean room and have all the required
tools and jigs. I would not even dare to remove the cover for fear of
contaminating it with the dust in the air of my house.
Why not just buy a new hard drive. I have seen 40 GByte hard drives
(IDE) for well under US$100.
What is that? I once read a detective story ("The Daffodil Affair", by
Michael Innes) where the bad guy needed to create two real ghosts, so he
planned to murder the police inspector and his sargeant to create the
needed ghosts. What is ghosting an installation? I assume you do not
propose to crush it with a road-roller or some other heavy equipment.
Just buy and install a new hard drive. That should stop your endless
hard drive rebuilding. Then restore the data that should be on it from
your backup tape.


--
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/V\ Registered Machine 73926.
/( )\ Shrewsbury, New Jersey http://counter.li.org
^^-^^ 7:55am up 3 days, 20:41, 3 users, load average: 2.44, 2.25, 2.18

Steve wrote:

Let me go a bit more into the details than the other fellows

We use norton ghost for years to backup and rollout windows-installations.
The big advantage of ghost is that it is very simple to use:
boot from a cd containing ghost and backup
boot from a cd again and restore and reset the computer and on you go,
cause ghost restore all the bootsectors on its own.

Things are not that simple on linux, but as always: things are better on
linux

if you want a complete image of your current installation, you can just
backup the whole harddisk byte for byte. This will end up in a very big
image (cause even parts of the harddisk not actually used are backuped) but
if you restore the image, your machine is ready to boot again.

The more common way is, to backup only the files of your installation and
restoring the backup involve the following steps:
i) boot from a rescue-system (knoppix-cd is recommended)
ii) call fdisk to prepare your new disk and then format the new partitions
iii) restore the files from backup
iv) chroot to the new system and run lilo to reinstall the boot-stuff

This is done very easily if you got used to it and brings you many
advantages, cause you can change things in each step. You can completely
change the partitioning and the mount-points, you can change the used the
filesystems and you can of course add/remove/change all kind of
raid-systems.

So this is the method of choice for ghosting linux-installations:
i) boot a rescue-system (or make you running system read-only, so files on
disk are not changed while backuping)
ii) use tar for backup

restoring is described above then.

good luck,
peter







--
peter pilsl
pilsl_usenet@goldfisch.at
http://www.goldfisch.at

On 2003-12-06, Steve <stevesusenet@yahoo.com> wrote:

If you want to make an image of your linux system (as opposed to a backup,
like from tar, etc.) you can use partimage:

Partition Image is a Linux/UNIX partition imaging utility: it
saves all used blocks in a partition to an image file. This image
file can be compressed using gzip or bzip2 compression to save
space, and even split into multiple files to be copied to movable
media such as Zip disks or CD-R.

The following partition types are supported:

- Ext2FS/Ext3FS (the Linux standard)
- ReiserFS (a new, powerful journalling file system)
- NTFS (Windows NT File System)
- FAT16/32 (DOS & Windows file systems)
- HPFS (OS/2 File System)
- JFS (IBM Jounalized File System for AIX)
- XFS (SGI Jounalized File System for IRIX)
- HFS (Hierarchical File System for MacOS)
- UFS (Unix File System)

This allows you to back up a full Linux/Windows system with a
single operation. When problems such as viruses, crashes, or
other errors occur, you just have to restore, and after several
minutes your system can be restored (boot record and all your
files) and fully working.

This is also very useful when installing the same software on
many machines: just install one of them, create an image, and
just restore the image on all other machines. Then, after the
first one, each machine installation can take just minutes.

http://www.partimage.org

--

-John (JohnThompson@new.rr.com)

In article <ZGcAb.437877$Tr4.1226544@attbi_s03>, Amanda L. Rossmiller wrote:
It's windows-speak. I think it means take a snapshot of a freshly installed
partition so that you can restore that partition later.

AFAICT, that's pretty much it.

--
Grant Edwards grante Yow! Where's th' DAFFY
at DUCK EXHIBIT??
visi.com

In article <3FD1D447.50309@d.b>, Jean-David Beyer wrote:
Nah, "rebuilding a drive" is more windows-speak. I think it just means
re-installing stuff. The last place I worked, the window/network-nazi used
to have to shut down windows servers and "rebuild drives". I guess windows
users get used to regularly reinstalling everything from scratch because
windows stops working right and nobody can figure out why.

I've never really had to "rebuild" drives under Linux, but there are a
number of crash-recovery systems available.

--
Grant Edwards grante Yow! Of course, you
at UNDERSTAND about the PLAIDS
visi.com in the SPIN CYCLE --

In article <3fd20fdb$1@e-post.inode.at>, peter pilsl wrote:

Why not? There are a number of crash-recovery systems that do exactly that.
Mondo is the one I've used, but there are others.

--
Grant Edwards grante Yow! .. Do you like
at "TENDER VITTLES?"?
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Lately, the godlike Dances With Crows wrote:
Is that Neal Stephensons Snow Crash Black Sun?

--
You are either with me or against me
.....no, wait, I can handle someone
disagreeing with me.

On 12 Dec 2003 11:58:01 GMT, Robert Kercher staggered into the Black Sun
and said:
Yes. Or the Black Sun referred to in Samuel Beckett's analysis of
"Krapp's Last Tape". Or the Black Sun referred to in the 4th track of
"La Sexorcisto: Devil Music Vol. 1" (White Zombie, 1992). Pick your
favorite reference :-] .

--
Matt G|There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see
Brainbench MVP for Linux Admin / mail: TRAP + SPAN don't belong
http://www.brainbench.com / Hire me!
-----------------------------/ http://crow202.dyndns.org/~mhgraham/resume