[lug] linux system cloning

[Ferdinand Schmid]

Thanks Zan and Dan for the info. 

It turns out that my approach worked find but the hardware I used (two
different old desktops) were both not working properly.  How likely is
this - I had three old machines that I often used for testing go out
on me within 2 days.

After using a properly working PC even Mondoarchive (restore) worked
fine (even with my original SuSE install).

Your point regarding the file system choice for booting partitions is
interesting.  During my troublesome cloning exercise I decided to give
KRUD a try (I mostly run SuSE these days).  My hope was that Mondo
would find the glibc it likes and then work properly.  I was really
surprised when I saw that Krud (Redhat) only offers ext2/3 as file
system choices.  On SuSE I could choose between Reiser, ext2/3, and
others for the past few years.  XFS and JFS are of course also
available choices.  Many of my systems need to be able to handle power
disconnects properly (and unattended) and I had done this using
Reiserfs in the past few years.  

I am sure Redhat made this choice based on some very good reasons but
it still felt like being kicked back into the 90ies when I couldn't
pick my FS of choice right from the beginning.  I think that Redhat
Linux is a good product overall and Dan's message below simply got me
to share this installer FS experience.

Thanks again for your help with my disk cloning problem,
Ferdinand


--On Saturday, March 15, 2003 07:46:07 PM -0700 "D. Stimits"
<stimits at attbi.com> wrote:

> I forgot to mention, I experimented with this after windows blew away
> a /boot/ partition on a test machine. The reason I did a full
> reinstall of all of grub (not just running grub-install to put in a
> boot sector) is because all of the binary files in the /boot/ were
> gone, and I installed a custom kernel on a new partition.
> 
> Also, the XFS filesystem, as root, is not directly supported by
> Redhat installers. What you describe above is one of the common ways
> to install XFS as a root filesystem. You might look at this for XFS,
> the idea is the same as what you are interested in:
> http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Linux+XFS-HOWTO/x154.html



--
Ferdinand Schmid
Architectural Energy Corporation
Celebrating 21 Years of Improving Building Energy Performance
http://www.archenergy.com