I have Mandrake 8.1 with updates on my desktop. I have recently purchased a big harddrive that I want to put in my desktop, replacing 2 current and smaller drives. I presently have, actually, 3 hdds, 1 CDROM, and 1 CD-RW drive. The 3 hdds and the CDROM use up both the onboard IDE ports. I installed a PCI IDE card to handle the CDRW. I plan to replace 2 of the 3 hdds with one big drive, leaving 2 connected to IDE 1 and move the 2 CD drives to IDE 2.
To do this I first disconnected the CDRW and plugged in the big hdd to its port. I then mounted, partitioned, and formatted the new drive via diskdrake. All that went fine. I created a mountpoint for the new drive called /newroot. Under this I created mountpoints for /newroot/var, /newroot/opt, /newroot/usr, /newroot/usr/local, and /newroot/home to match up with the partitioning scheme I gave the new drive. I mounted all the partitions to their respective mountpoints. I then tried archiving the entire linux install to the /newroot partition. I made 4 separate attempts, all failing due to segfaults or other problems. From my / directory I ran the following commands: First attempt: "tar -cPj --exclude proc --exclude newroot /* > /newroot/linuxsystem.tar.bz2" This ran for a while, seemingly to completion, but when I cd'd to /newroot and ran "tar -xjvf linuxsystem.tar.bz2" I got fatal errors and a suggestion to try repair a broken/corrupt bzip2 archive. I tried it and it produced a LOT of sub-bz2 files. So many that it finally filled up the /newroot partition's space allotment. I had to abort. Second and third attempts: "tar -cPz --exclude proc --exclude newroot /* > /newroot/linuxsystem.tar.gz" It ran for a short while, then segfaulted. There was still plenty of space on the new drive and plenty of space still on the old drives. Gzip appeared to be crashing the system in this context because I finally tried just: "tar -cP --exclude proc --exclude newroot /* > /newroot/linuxsystem.tar" This ran beyond the crash point from the gzip attempt but later, as I knew it would, it consumed all the available space on the /newroot partition and I had to abort. The indications at this point seemed to be that tar was going to go along OK on its own but if I tried including any compression into the proceedure, it would either produce a corrupt/broken archive or it would crash in the early stages of its creation (using gzip). So, I need suggestions on how to do this. First, was I correct in excluding /proc? Is this not the directory one needs to exclude to avoid an reiterative copy of the harddrive? I KNOW I must exclude /newroot, otherwise the resulting tarball will also contain a copy of the resulting tarball. How do I do this? I am considering also doing a simple "cp -R /* /newroot" of the old system to the new harddrive but this presents a lot of problems, not least of which it would copy /newroot and all subdirectories into /newroot, etc...and then there is /proc again. praedor praedor
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