Dale & Yvonne Ogilvie wrote: > OK, so I have three suggestions thus far: > tar - simple but you can't boot a .gz > mondo - no SLES8 rpms, I sense the duct tape and wire rising... apart from > this looks promising. > g4u - ftp based, looks less promising than mondo > > And all of these methods would have to cope with the fact that the raid > controller on the server is not supported in the standard SLES kernel. Hmmm. > Perhaps I should try mondo on a less tricky to install box...
Boot with knoppix or something that does recognise your raid (with knoppix, boot 'kernel26', which often helps to support SATA and more RAID cards) I'll assume you have two interesting partitions on your hard drive, hda1 for the place you installed your OS, and hda2 for a spare data partition that's much bigger. mkdir /data mount /dev/hda2 /data dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/data/dd-image-of-hda1 Later, if you want to restore ... dd if=/data/dd-image-of-hda1 of=/dev/hda1 This will copy everything of interest except for the MBR boot code. Note 1 :- If you want dd to run faster, you need to find an efficient block size for it to use (and add the parameter bs=65536 if you choose 64k, for example). I don't know what would be appropriate for your hardware and kernel, someone else might do this more often and therefore have found out. Try a few variations, using the 'time' command ... remember that the first run will always be slower ... and the count parameter, so you don't have to wait until the whole thing has been copied! time dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/data/dd-image-of-hda1 bs=65536 count=2048 Note 2 :- The resulting image will be the same size as your hda partition, regardless of how much of it is actually being used for data. If you want to hang on to the image file for a while, but need to reclaim some of your disk space, compress it ... bzip2 -9 /data/dd-image-of-hda1 This will take a very long time, though. -jim
