Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Sony Viao Vista and Gentoo
On Fri, 20 Jul 2007 00:34:23 +0100, Stroller wrote: Enclosures are great when you want to keep a drive in there. But in the case that you want to - say - pull the hard-drive out of your laptop and plug it into a desktop PC for just a few minutes these adaptor cables are very useful indeed. The link above prices them at $17 - a price at which, IMO, you can't go wrong. Except when they corrupt your data, which I've had two different adaptors do when copying large amounts of data. If the hard drive is already in another computer, why not connect them with ethernet or firewire cables instead of removing drives? -- Neil Bothwick Exercise daily. Eat wisely. Die anyway. signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Sony Viao Vista and Gentoo
Enclosures are great when you want to keep a drive in there. But in the case that you want to - say - pull the hard-drive out of your laptop and plug it into a desktop PC for just a few minutes these adaptor cables are very useful indeed. The link above prices them at $17 - a price at which, IMO, you can't go wrong. Sorry I was under the impression he was using a dedicated drive for the purpose. I have a drive/enclosure that I lug around from machine to machine. Though, if it were me, I'd still get an enclosure if just to have that future capability. FWIW, James, as an experiment I did restore the factory partition table, MBR, and Utility and Restore partitions and from there was able to restore my Inspiron to factory defaults. Then I was able to restore it back to the Gentoo/XP dual boot configuration (whew!). The only thing I would change based on the experience is that partimage appears to be a smarter/faster/slightly-easier alternative to ntfsclone and/or dd. And gparted is of course easier to work with than working w/ fdisk/ntfsresize directly. HTH -- Albert W. Hopkins -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Sony Viao Vista and Gentoo
On 20 Jul 2007, at 13:04, Albert Hopkins wrote: ... Enclosures are great when you want to keep a drive in there. But in the case that you want to - say - pull the hard-drive out of your laptop and plug it into a desktop PC for just a few minutes these adaptor cables are very useful indeed. The link above prices them at $17 - a price at which, IMO, you can't go wrong. Sorry I was under the impression he was using a dedicated drive for the purpose. I have a drive/enclosure that I lug around from machine to machine. Though, if it were me, I'd still get an enclosure if just to have that future capability. I don't know about this particular case. I originally replied off-list because there was some Windows stuff I mentioned in my message that I felt to be off-topic inappropriate for the list. The link that I gave was simply to say get one of these, and backup, whatever you do. I personally find this kind of dongly external adaptor to be more useful for temporary ad-hoc use. In my house an external case will very quickly find a spare drive shoved in it and I'll fill it with archive and backup material. When I'm working on installation of a new machine dd'ing partitions around I'd rather leave no room for error and not have a drive with that kind of stuff on it connected to the machine. Additionally, in my experience, external drive enclosures are designed to take either an 2.5 or 3.5, EIDE or SATA drive, but not all kinds. The product I linked to is very versatile and will accommodate any of these drive types that I happen to have lying around, happen to be able to pull from my playstation or happen to need to work on. I fix PCs for a living and this is in my bag always - I'm sure it's used on average as often as once per week or ten days. I haven't experienced the problems Neil Bothwick describes - maybe mine is from a different batch or factory - although I have (not recently) had it decline to work with some (older?) 3.5 EIDE drives. YMMV, horses for courses it may depend how often you need to use it. Stroller.
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Sony Viao Vista and Gentoo
On Thu, 2007-07-19 at 17:58 +, James wrote: Albert Hopkins marduk at gentoo.org writes: [...] I'm not sure if Vista versus XP make any difference. In a recent post on this list about grub one reader posted about the fact that with Vista the boot.ini file is gone. I'm not sure that this effects your proposed method? I've no experience with Vista, so I can't say for sure. But it shouldn't make any difference since boot.ini is used by the Windows bootloader and we aren't using that (we're replacing it with GRUB). 2. Back up MBR, parition table, and partitions to DVD, network or external drive. 3. Use ntfsresize to shrink the XP partition, make sure it still boots. Hmmm, I must have missed something. In step one you said to boot via a liveCD or RIP linux. Now in step 3 you say to use ntfsresize. Is it available on the liveCD (I never used it during an install)? A few more details on this step would be useful. Sorry when I said boot via liveCD I wasn't specifically referring to the Gentoo LiveCD, but a/any liveCD. The one I always use is RIPLinux. It's great for this kind of stuff.. but I actually use it on a USB stick as opposed to a physical CD. RIPLinux comes with all kinds of stuff: ntfs/lvm/raid tools, partimage, [g]parted, qemu, mt, mtools, network clients, cd/dvd recording software, ndiswrapper, alsa, boot-from-grub, X11, etc. etc). Fit's on a 128MB USB stick and loads right into RAM. It's awesome. You'll never look at another live cd for recovery/administration again. Don't tell anyone I said this, but it's also great for installing Gentoo ;-) 4. Use the space left over from ntfsresize to create partition(s)/install Gentoo. OK, at this point I'm still using the liveCD or does RIP linux have tools for access into fdisk or such? (No experience with RIPLinux) Yes. Again, RIPLinux has *everything* I'll be more specific what I did (paraphrased for simplicity. Again, I've never done this with Vista.. There may be differences. Might wanna check with a Vista user. When I got my laptop, I booted it with RIPLinux. The laptop drive looked like this +--+ | MBR | +--+-+ | sda1 | Dell Utility Partition | +--+-+ | sda2 | Windows XP | +--+-+ | sda3 | Rescue Partition| +--+ + First thing I did is copy the partition table. sfdisk is a good one for this. I had an external USB hard drive that I connected to the laptop and mounted. I copied the partition table to it. # sfdisk -d /dev/sda /mnt/usbdrive/Inspiron_1505_factory.sfdisk Next I made a copy of the MBR: # dd if=/dev/sda of=/mnt/usbdrive/Inspiron_1505_factory.mbr \ bs=446 count=1 I also backed up the Utility and Rescue partitions. I don't think I backed up the Windows one, but you could. Use dd and either copy to an external drive or dvdrecord (may want to pipe it through bzip2). # dd if=/dev/sda1 |bzip2 \ /mnt/usbdrive/Inspiron_1505_factory_Dell_Utility.sda1.bz2 # dd if=/dev/sda3 |bzip2 \ /mnt/usbdrive/Inspiron_1505_factory_Rescue.sda3.bz2 ...Utility.sda1.bz2 turned out to be ~2.8GB and ...Rescure.sda2.bz2 is about 3.4 GB. So they could easily fit on a single-layer DVD+/-R. Use ntfsresize on the /dev/sda2. You will need to mount it (ro) first to see how much space it's actually *using* first. You could also optionally get rid of the Rescue partition since you have a copy that can be restored if need be. # ntfsresize -s 20G /dev/sda2 After this you'll need to fdisk the drive. Basically remove sda2 and add it again with a smaller size *or* use gparted (included with RIPLinux) and have it do all that for you much easier. I also replaced sda1 with an ext2 filesystem and use it for /boot. Use the remaining space from sda2 and sda3 to to create a Gentoo partition. So in the end you'll have something like this: +--+ | MBR | +--+-+ | sda1 | /boot | +--+-+ | sda2 | Windows XP (smaller)| +--+-+ | sda3 | Gentoo / (larger) | +--+ + Or you could create an sda4 for swap (I actually use a swap file on /). Might wanna reboot after the changes to make sure Windows still comes up. Then back into RIPLinux to install Gentoo. Final step is to install grub on the MBR and add a root=/dev/sda3 entry for Gentoo and chainload /dev/sda2 for Windows to boot. Then if I ever want to restore to factory, (hopefully) all I need to to is boot with RIPLinux, restore the partition table, restore the MBR, restore the Utility and Rescue partitions, and then reboot the machine into Dell's Utility partition and use it to restore the Windows partition back to factory. In reality I haven't actually tried that LOL. But I do have a working system that dual boots Gentoo and XP. HTH -- Albert W.
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Sony Viao Vista and Gentoo
Am Donnerstag 19 Juli 2007 21:01 schrieb Albert Hopkins: On Thu, 2007-07-19 at 17:58 +, James wrote: Albert Hopkins marduk at gentoo.org writes: [...] I'm not sure if Vista versus XP make any difference. In a recent post on this list about grub one reader posted about the fact that with Vista the boot.ini file is gone. I'm not sure that this effects your proposed method? I've no experience with Vista, so I can't say for sure. But it shouldn't make any difference since boot.ini is used by the Windows bootloader and we aren't using that (we're replacing it with GRUB). Well, actually we are using both (chainloading ntldr by grub) and if you are changing the partition scheme, you might need to work with it. Wikipedia about the Vista bootloader: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Vista_Startup_Process 2. Back up MBR, parition table, and partitions to DVD, network or external drive. 3. Use ntfsresize to shrink the XP partition, make sure it still boots. Hmmm, I must have missed something. In step one you said to boot via a liveCD or RIP linux. Now in step 3 you say to use ntfsresize. Is it available on the liveCD (I never used it during an install)? A few more details on this step would be useful. Sorry when I said boot via liveCD I wasn't specifically referring to the Gentoo LiveCD, but a/any liveCD. The one I always use is RIPLinux. It's great for this kind of stuff.. but I actually use it on a USB stick as opposed to a physical CD. RIPLinux comes with all kinds of stuff: ntfs/lvm/raid tools, partimage, [g]parted, qemu, mt, mtools, network clients, cd/dvd recording software, ndiswrapper, alsa, boot-from-grub, X11, etc. etc). Fit's on a 128MB USB stick and loads right into RAM. It's awesome. You'll never look at another live cd for recovery/administration again. Don't tell anyone I said this, but it's also great for installing Gentoo ;-) Is it stable? I've tried the newest Knoppix which can copy itself into RAM, too (although WAY slower because of its size the disk speed) and it always crashed after some time although there was enough space left and the RAM is known good. pgpLpwpA5wv5V.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Sony Viao Vista and Gentoo
On Thu, 2007-07-19 at 21:29 +0200, Florian Philipp wrote: Well, actually we are using both (chainloading ntldr by grub) and if you are changing the partition scheme, you might need to work with it. Sorry I was confused. [...] Sorry when I said boot via liveCD I wasn't specifically referring to the Gentoo LiveCD, but a/any liveCD. The one I always use is RIPLinux. It's great for this kind of stuff.. but I actually use it on a USB stick as opposed to a physical CD. RIPLinux comes with all kinds of stuff: ntfs/lvm/raid tools, partimage, [g]parted, qemu, mt, mtools, network clients, cd/dvd recording software, ndiswrapper, alsa, boot-from-grub, X11, etc. etc). Fit's on a 128MB USB stick and loads right into RAM. It's awesome. You'll never look at another live cd for recovery/administration again. Don't tell anyone I said this, but it's also great for installing Gentoo ;-) Is it stable? I've tried the newest Knoppix which can copy itself into RAM, too (although WAY slower because of its size the disk speed) and it always crashed after some time although there was enough space left and the RAM is known good. I've been using RIPLinux for 3 years and haven't had any issues with it. I would not compare it to Knoppix though as they have different goals. Knoppix is more pack as much Linux on a cd as possible whereas RIPLinux is made specifically for recovery and administration. The software list is kept down to the essentials. The non-X version is only about 32MB, but it contains a host of stuff that administrators need... probably stuff that you won't find on Knoppix. For example the last time I used Knoppix, and it has been a while, it didn't recognize LVM volumes. But RIPLinux is not the type of live cd you'd want to boot and use as a daily linux. It's a tractor not sedan lol. Because of it's size it loads pretty quickly. The documentation states You'll need at least 128MB of RAM and a 486DX CPU. Though it will run on old hardware it comes with the latest software... even will mount my ext4dev drive. The X11 version will on-the-fly download the latest Firefox snapshot from mozilla.org and load/run it from RAM if u tell it to. It comes with Qemu for testing images. It can even boot itself into qemu. Great utility. I can't stop talking about it LOL. The only thing I wish it had that's missing are Amanda client and OpenVPN, but those are not major items. -- Albert W. Hopkins -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Sony Viao Vista and Gentoo
On Thu, 2007-07-19 at 21:45 +, James wrote: Ok Albert, I'm convinced. I'm going to give your suggestions a whirl. One cautious step I'm adding as suggested, is to back up the virgin drive with DD. I'm looking for a cable so that I can copy the sony drive onto a gentoo partition of another system via a usb 2.0 to ata/eide cable. It was suggested this cable: ttp://tinyurl.com/ynhszy [sic] But being in Florida and only being able to use the company credit card over the phone, does anyone know of another cable I can purchase to back up the laptop's drive? HOwfully a vendor that takes visa over the phone brain dead company policy I would actually opt for an enclosure. Qalculate is telling me that £24.95 is ~$51 USD. You can get an enclosure at Best Buy , Frys (if they have that there) or CompUSA at around the same price (e.g. http://tinyurl.com/2tfyml). Does your company allow you to go to purchase at a store? Also, you may want to consider ntfsclone instead of dd for backing up ntfs partitions. ntfsclone is sparse-file and free-space aware so may be more efficient WRT disk space and time. I haven't tried it yet myself, but it's on my list. -- Albert W. Hopkins -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Sony Viao Vista and Gentoo
On 19 Jul 2007, at 23:22, Albert Hopkins wrote: ... I'm looking for a cable so that I can copy the sony drive onto a gentoo partition of another system via a usb 2.0 to ata/eide cable. It was suggested this cable: ttp://tinyurl.com/ynhszy [sic] But being in Florida... These are really easy to find and are currently very common from many online vendors. I wasn't recommending that supplier as I paid less for mine - you can find lots of places that sell these simply by Googling USB EIDE SATA adaptor. Since I'm in the UK that was the first (sponsored) link I found - I only meant it to illustrate my suggestion of get one of these, so you can back up. When I search again I find the second result is a US vendor - they should save themselves money and use Google Ad's regional settings to exclude the likes of me: http://tekgems.com/Products/kl-usb-sata- ide-25-35.htm I would actually opt for an enclosure. Qalculate is telling me that £24.95 is ~$51 USD. You can get an enclosure at Best Buy , Frys (if they have that there) or CompUSA at around the same price ... Enclosures are great when you want to keep a drive in there. But in the case that you want to - say - pull the hard-drive out of your laptop and plug it into a desktop PC for just a few minutes these adaptor cables are very useful indeed. The link above prices them at $17 - a price at which, IMO, you can't go wrong. Stroller. -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
