I've never done this before so it seems like right now would be a great time to learn. Thanks in advance.
I've just done this installation on my laptop. For the most part it's working fine. Still a few things to iron out but it's good enough that I'd like to save the state of the machine so that should something happen I have a way to restore where I am today. Since the disk usage is currently about 4GB it seems like a great time to do it. Is this possible? I think it's essentially what the stage 3 file is that I use when I install, isn't it? If I can keep the whole thing under 5GB then I can write it on a DVD and I'm in a really safe space for a fast reinstall if something happens. >From the running system here's what things look like right now: laptop1 ~ # df Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/sda5 15820524 3641240 11375636 25% / udev 10240 172 10068 2% /dev /dev/sda6 1320272 189304 1063900 16% /var /dev/sda7 10278304 312012 9444184 4% /home shm 1003844 0 1003844 0% /dev/shm laptop1 ~ # My thought is to boot using the install CD, mount a USB drive at /mnt/gentoo, then create a mount point 'backup' on the USB drive to mount each of the 3 partitions I want to back up one at a time. ( /, /var and /home) Then I'll mount each partition by itself and use tar to create a single file for each partition where that file gets written on the USB drive. When I'm done I have 3 files. Restore would be to create the partitions anew, untar, install grub from in the chroot, and reboot. Is this a reasonable way to go? Is there something easier? (That seems pretty easy to me...) I don't want to create images of the partitions because I might want to put the data onto a different drive or in a different configuration. (Like no /var or something.) If this makes sense then what commands would I want to use to do this correctly. Presumably it needs to tar up links, file system permissions, and everything else. Since the Quick Install guide uses tar xjpf stage3* to extract the main directories & files, and assuming the USB drive is sdb1, would I just use mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/gentoo mount /dev/sda5 /mnt/gentoo/backup tar cjfp ./ROOT.tar.bz2 backup and then repeat for the other two partitions? Or is there more to it? I'm rambling here so I'll hope for a quick answer and then give it a try. Thanks in advance, Mark -- [email protected] mailing list
