I'm currently setting up a Linux based problem ticketing and request logging system (web UI, perl cgi, MySQL backend) in a pure NT environment. Since I'll be leaving this job at the end of December, I'm trying to set the box up to be as autonomous as possible. Currently, I have it doing simple backups to a scsi qic-wide tape drive. My question is... I'm reading the Bootdisk-HOWTO and looking into making an autorestore disk, as in, if for some reason it wont boot anymore, it gets corrupted, or whatever occurs to require a restore of the system from the tape, pop the AutoMagical Restore Disk (tm) in the drive, hit reset, and come back in a few hours. I figure I can get the utils I need on the disk and even script it to work right. However, it occured to me that if filesystems are horqed beyond repair, the partition tables can be thusly killed as well, or at the very least, slightly unreliable. I was therefore wanting the autorestore disk to do the following: 1) Boot a reasonable kernel (scsi support, fs support, etc, just enough to restore). 2) automatically nuke all present partitions and recreate them based on a template or script 3) mke2fs them (or mkswap), and mount them in the correct places (/, /boot, /usr) 4) begin restore from tape. 1, 3, and 4 I can handle. 2 is the problem. Does anyone know of an fdisk utility that will accept cmdline params for partitions, or maybe read a template of some sort? This is by no means mission critical (I'm just doing it as a favor to make my boss's life less suckful), but he barely understands the inner workings of NT, and IMO teaching him enough about linux is out of the question. I just want a solution where he puts the current tape in the tape drive, pops a floppy biscuit in the floppy drive, hits reset, and hopefully in a few hours its back up and running. Thanks in advance for any and all pointers you can give me. And BTW, if I'm asking the wrong list, I apologize in advance. --jd
