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Is there a method to clone the arch distro from HDD A to HDD B? Linux related, no windoze.
Prediction...This year will be a very odd year!
Hard work does not kill people but why risk it: Charlie Mccarthy
A man is not complete until he is married..then..he is finished.
When ALL is lost, what can be found? Even bytes get lonely for a little bit! X-ray confirms Iam spineless!
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i believe it can be done with:
dd if=/dev/hddA of=/dev/hddB
And where were all the sportsmen who always pulled you though?
They're all resting down in Cornwall
writing up their memoirs for a paper-back edition
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Thank you for the information, kakabaratruskia.
Will certainly see what happens even though in arch the designators might be different since disc ID's are utilized.
Always open for good suggestions here.
Prediction...This year will be a very odd year!
Hard work does not kill people but why risk it: Charlie Mccarthy
A man is not complete until he is married..then..he is finished.
When ALL is lost, what can be found? Even bytes get lonely for a little bit! X-ray confirms Iam spineless!
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I have googled for the dd command options and find a description for cloning another machine from a given machine.
The purpose here is to have it on the same machine in order to do experimenting with the setup.
A few references are made in some googles to requiring the new HDD to be partitioned and formatted identically to the original. This requirement is not always emphasized.
I include a url discussing the use of DD:http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/tutorials/986/4/
The procedure outlined in the reference adds a definition for the cache size.
Other references make the remark that many attempts to use DD command have ruined HDD's!!
Nothing like confusion!
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Preception denies perception......
Prediction...This year will be a very odd year!
Hard work does not kill people but why risk it: Charlie Mccarthy
A man is not complete until he is married..then..he is finished.
When ALL is lost, what can be found? Even bytes get lonely for a little bit! X-ray confirms Iam spineless!
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A few references are made in some googles to requiring the new HDD to be partitioned and formatted identically to the original. This requirement is not always emphasized
Right, that's why I don't use dd. I use rescue floppies or a boot CD like the SuSE boot.iso to boot into linux without booting from a hard drive. Then once booted up:
mkdir /DF
mkdir /DT
mke2fs -m 0 /dev/{to} ### (if using ext2, for instance)
mount -noatime /dev/{from} /DF
mount /dev/{to} /DT
cd /DF
cp -a ./ /DT
umount /DT
umount /DF
all done
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Jak;
Thanks for the info. I don't have a Suse.iso but consider the following:
Insert arch 0.5 CD into cd rom and press enter at boot prompt.
When the boot reached #;
........ Perform the steps you outlined.......
Or does this not function unless you chroot to enable access?
Prediction...This year will be a very odd year!
Hard work does not kill people but why risk it: Charlie Mccarthy
A man is not complete until he is married..then..he is finished.
When ALL is lost, what can be found? Even bytes get lonely for a little bit! X-ray confirms Iam spineless!
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jak;
Additionally, I would expect in arch to have to use device ID's such as:
/dev/discs/disc0
/dev/discs/discX
These would be the ID's in fstab for arch HDD's
Prediction...This year will be a very odd year!
Hard work does not kill people but why risk it: Charlie Mccarthy
A man is not complete until he is married..then..he is finished.
When ALL is lost, what can be found? Even bytes get lonely for a little bit! X-ray confirms Iam spineless!
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Jax,
Does the DT drive have to be formatted for linux or can it be completely blank?
If it is to be addressed as a viable drive in fstab, it needs a file system which you have provided. Is that sufficient to establish the DT drive in arch linux? I would expect in addition that the procedure needs to address ....chroot /mnt/DF.. then....cd /DF.....
Perhaps another statement is needed to talk to the /DT drive as well?
Prediction...This year will be a very odd year!
Hard work does not kill people but why risk it: Charlie Mccarthy
A man is not complete until he is married..then..he is finished.
When ALL is lost, what can be found? Even bytes get lonely for a little bit! X-ray confirms Iam spineless!
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jak,
I am not certain that the arch 0.5 boot disk entry of .....mke2fs ... will be recognized as a viable entry assuming that this boot method is similar to what you describe for the Suse.iso which I assume you mean the CD resulting from burning the .iso image.
Prediction...This year will be a very odd year!
Hard work does not kill people but why risk it: Charlie Mccarthy
A man is not complete until he is married..then..he is finished.
When ALL is lost, what can be found? Even bytes get lonely for a little bit! X-ray confirms Iam spineless!
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Another project people i know have used is Mondo. I havent used it but i believe it creates a bootable CD/CDs image of your HD. So in turn you can just toss in your cd and it will create exactly what you had. It gives you the ablity to select what you want to backup.. /home /usr etc..
Check it out here: http://www.microwerks.net/~hugo/
*I guess its not a direct copy tool, but it still may come in handy.
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Punkass, !!!!!!!
Thanks for the input. It does apply toi elements of the arch install as you mention.
I desire that the cimplete hard drive be cloned so I can boot on a separate HDD and keep this one out of trouble while I mash into the other.
Prediction...This year will be a very odd year!
Hard work does not kill people but why risk it: Charlie Mccarthy
A man is not complete until he is married..then..he is finished.
When ALL is lost, what can be found? Even bytes get lonely for a little bit! X-ray confirms Iam spineless!
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Does the DT drive have to be formatted for linux or can it be completely blank
It's not a drive, it's a partition. My instructions assume you already used fdisk to create the partitions you plan to use.
I would expect in addition that the procedure needs to address ....chroot /mnt/DF.. then....cd /DF.....
No chroot needed, that would serve no purpose for these instructions.
arch ... use device ID's such as: /dev/discs/disc0
That's why I suggested suse boot.iso so you don't have to cope with those long devfs names.
not certain that the arch 0.5 boot disk entry of .....mke2fs ... will be recognized as a viable entry
mke2fs is the command to format your target partition, it's not a boot entry.
Perhaps another statement is needed to talk to the /DT drive as well?
No, I use those instructions often. They work.
Keep in mind the instructions assume you are booted up from rescue CD or boot floppies, and thus your source partition and your target partition are not "connected" to your bootup environment. That's why you mount them to /DF and /DT.
You don't need to worry about fstab entries just yet. Once you are done copying, then before you unmount /DT, you must update your fstab in the target partition to show the actual partition where it now exists. Or if you already unmounted /DT, just mount it again, so you can edit fstab.
Is it clear now?
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jak;
I am appreciative of your efforts in describing the method you have used to establish a clone.
My purpose is to create a second drive. It must be an image of the first drive and boot up in the same fashion. It is not merely a new partition.
I wish to work on the arch install without causing trouble unforseen. This is best done in a separate drive with the whole arch install available to permit changes and experimenting with new kernels.
The arch system utilizes pacman program to update and maintain the arch system. If one changes his kernel, creating a custom kernel, pacman will not upgrade it.
A second install of arch permits changes without affecting the pacman supported system.
I had hoped to do a clone of the whole disc but haven't found any method which ensures a safe and sure clone.
If I am wrong about your method, please correct me. I understand it creates a partition on the same HDD of the arch data on the same HDD.
Prediction...This year will be a very odd year!
Hard work does not kill people but why risk it: Charlie Mccarthy
A man is not complete until he is married..then..he is finished.
When ALL is lost, what can be found? Even bytes get lonely for a little bit! X-ray confirms Iam spineless!
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There's also a program called partimage, that copies you're drive info, like dd, but it only copies the used portions of it, and it then compresses it to a nice gz or bz file. You can recover after the disc, just like it was. It's curse based. You might try it, but it's not in the repos. Once I tried to build a package for arch, but couldn't.
http://www.partimage.org/
And where were all the sportsmen who always pulled you though?
They're all resting down in Cornwall
writing up their memoirs for a paper-back edition
of the Boy Scout Manual.
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Kakabaratruskia;
The partimage idea seems appropriate if I prepare the HDD with image partitions and write the data into them.
Not certain if lilo is transferred but it seems reasonable that it would be a used partition file.
It may be that the MBR isn't included, however.
Have to ask a few questions I guess.
They do mention it operates more correctly than the dd setup.
There are forums available, too for investigating performance.
Looks promising!!!
Prediction...This year will be a very odd year!
Hard work does not kill people but why risk it: Charlie Mccarthy
A man is not complete until he is married..then..he is finished.
When ALL is lost, what can be found? Even bytes get lonely for a little bit! X-ray confirms Iam spineless!
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Googling reveals the following in respect to MBR with partimage:3 Changes
0.6.0: (2001-xx-yy)
Network support with SSL encryption: there are two versions (server and clients). For example, you can save the image of a computer on the disk of another computer.
The multi-thread copy: it increases the speed of the copy.
Copy optimisations: several blocks are copied in a single operation. This dramatically increases the speed of the copy.
The batch mode, which allows for unattended operation (no questions, no forms, no message boxes)
Many new other options (For example, partimage can exit automatically on finish)
New debug log file: it will make debugging easier
Support of ReiserFS-3.6 (provided with kernel-2.4) New image file format to have a better error detection, a new source code kernel, to save the MBR
The MBR is saved, and can be restored (it contains the boot loader and the partition table)
IBM JFS support added (still experimental)
partimaged official port is 4025
0.3.5.3:(2001-04-02) New translations
0.3.5.2:(2001-03-09) ReiserFS-3.6 support
0.3.5.1:(2001-02-01) Bug fixes, to avoid a segfault
0.3.
Prediction...This year will be a very odd year!
Hard work does not kill people but why risk it: Charlie Mccarthy
A man is not complete until he is married..then..he is finished.
When ALL is lost, what can be found? Even bytes get lonely for a little bit! X-ray confirms Iam spineless!
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Additional data setting up requirements for Partimage compile:
2.2 Requirements
Many libraries are required to compile/run Partition Image:
libz gzip compression support
libbz2 bzip2 compression support
liblzo lzo compression support
libnewt GUI (Graphical User Interface)
libslang Required for newt
libssl OpenSSL: encryption of data over the network
libcrypt support for password
Prediction...This year will be a very odd year!
Hard work does not kill people but why risk it: Charlie Mccarthy
A man is not complete until he is married..then..he is finished.
When ALL is lost, what can be found? Even bytes get lonely for a little bit! X-ray confirms Iam spineless!
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Next, it says that a CD is downloadable as follows:2.3 Compilation and installation
Different versions of Partition Image
There are 3 versions of Partition Image you can use:
The source code you have to compile it, and it may be difficult, because it require many libraries
The static binary this is very easy to use: this is an i386 executable binary, you just have to run it.
The boot/root disks if you don't have an installed linux system, or if you want to work on your root linux partition
The bootable eltorito cdrom you can run partimage from a bootable cdrom, where the image files are burned
All these versions can be downloaded from the web site. Here, we will explain how to compile the source code:
Prediction...This year will be a very odd year!
Hard work does not kill people but why risk it: Charlie Mccarthy
A man is not complete until he is married..then..he is finished.
When ALL is lost, what can be found? Even bytes get lonely for a little bit! X-ray confirms Iam spineless!
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Important info for the use of partimage regarding the partitioning required:Restoring data will copy the data which were saved into an image file, into a partition. Data already on the partition you are restoring to will be lost! The partition to restore data to must already exist before you proceed. If it doesn't exist, you must create it before with a tool, such as fdisk, GNU parted, or other tools. You won't be able to restore information if it won't fit in the new partition, so make sure you create one with enough space.
Note added:
(This seems to say partition the new drive before trying to "restore" in the new drive, which is my purpose in using the partimage program...insert drive A partitions into Drive B partitions).
Restoring an image into a partition is an easy operation. You must specify the image file to use (it will only be read), and the partition to restore (it will be overwritten). The only extra option you can choose is Erase free blocks with zero values. If this option is enabled, all blocks which are not used are erased with zero bytes. This may be useful if you want to be sure that the data which were on the partition before this operation are fully erased. If this option is disabled, old data which was on currently unused blocks can be accessed (with some difficulty), because nothing is written on these blocks. These old data can be read with tools such as dd (GNU convert and copy).
When all options are set, you can click on the restore button to run the operation.
Prediction...This year will be a very odd year!
Hard work does not kill people but why risk it: Charlie Mccarthy
A man is not complete until he is married..then..he is finished.
When ALL is lost, what can be found? Even bytes get lonely for a little bit! X-ray confirms Iam spineless!
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The downloaded tar bz2 is listed here and am not sure I can run it in arch:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------tar:/root/partimage-0.6.2.tar.bz2/partimage-0.6.2/CVS
tar:/root/partimage-0.6.2.tar.bz2/partimage-0.6.2/debian
tar:/root/partimage-0.6.2.tar.bz2/partimage-0.6.2/intl
tar:/root/partimage-0.6.2.tar.bz2/partimage-0.6.2/macros
tar:/root/partimage-0.6.2.tar.bz2/partimage-0.6.2/po
tar:/root/partimage-0.6.2.tar.bz2/partimage-0.6.2/redhat
tar:/root/partimage-0.6.2.tar.bz2/partimage-0.6.2/src
tar:/root/partimage-0.6.2.tar.bz2/partimage-0.6.2/tools
tar:/root/partimage-0.6.2.tar.bz2/partimage-0.6.2/ABOUT-NLS
tar:/root/partimage-0.6.2.tar.bz2/partimage-0.6.2/aclocal.m4
tar:/root/partimage-0.6.2.tar.bz2/partimage-0.6.2/AUTHORS
tar:/root/partimage-0.6.2.tar.bz2/partimage-0.6.2/autogen.sh
tar:/root/partimage-0.6.2.tar.bz2/partimage-0.6.2/BOOT-ROOT-creation.txt
tar:/root/partimage-0.6.2.tar.bz2/partimage-0.6.2/BUGS
tar:/root/partimage-0.6.2.tar.bz2/partimage-0.6.2/ChangeLog
tar:/root/partimage-0.6.2.tar.bz2/partimage-0.6.2/config.guess
tar:/root/partimage-0.6.2.tar.bz2/partimage-0.6.2/config.h.in
tar:/root/partimage-0.6.2.tar.bz2/partimage-0.6.2/config.rpath
tar:/root/partimage-0.6.2.tar.bz2/partimage-0.6.2/config.sub
tar:/root/partimage-0.6.2.tar.bz2/partimage-0.6.2/configure
tar:/root/partimage-0.6.2.tar.bz2/partimage-0.6.2/configure.ac
tar:/root/partimage-0.6.2.tar.bz2/partimage-0.6.2/COPYING
tar:/root/partimage-0.6.2.tar.bz2/partimage-0.6.2/depcomp
tar:/root/partimage-0.6.2.tar.bz2/partimage-0.6.2/FORMAT
tar:/root/partimage-0.6.2.tar.bz2/partimage-0.6.2/FUTURE
tar:/root/partimage-0.6.2.tar.bz2/partimage-0.6.2/gettext.h
tar:/root/partimage-0.6.2.tar.bz2/partimage-0.6.2/INSTALL
tar:/root/partimage-0.6.2.tar.bz2/partimage-0.6.2/install-sh
tar:/root/partimage-0.6.2.tar.bz2/partimage-0.6.2/libintl.jar
tar:/root/partimage-0.6.2.tar.bz2/partimage-0.6.2/ltmain.sh
tar:/root/partimage-0.6.2.tar.bz2/partimage-0.6.2/Makefile.am
tar:/root/partimage-0.6.2.tar.bz2/partimage-0.6.2/Makefile.in
tar:/root/partimage-0.6.2.tar.bz2/partimage-0.6.2/missing
tar:/root/partimage-0.6.2.tar.bz2/partimage-0.6.2/mkinstalldirs
tar:/root/partimage-0.6.2.tar.bz2/partimage-0.6.2/msgunfmt.tcl
tar:/root/partimage-0.6.2.tar.bz2/partimage-0.6.2/PACKAGES
tar:/root/partimage-0.6.2.tar.bz2/partimage-0.6.2/partimage.lsm
tar:/root/partimage-0.6.2.tar.bz2/partimage-0.6.2/README
tar:/root/partimage-0.6.2.tar.bz2/partimage-0.6.2/README.partimaged
tar:/root/partimage-0.6.2.tar.bz2/partimage-0.6.2/SURVEY
tar:/root/partimage-0.6.2.tar.bz2/partimage-0.6.2/TESTS
tar:/root/partimage-0.6.2.tar.bz2/partimage-0.6.2/THANKS
tar:/root/partimage-0.6.2.tar.bz2/partimage-0.6.2/TODO
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I would appreciate any advice concerning the use of this program in arch. If it is useable, the application to the hdd transfer seems feasible.
Prediction...This year will be a very odd year!
Hard work does not kill people but why risk it: Charlie Mccarthy
A man is not complete until he is married..then..he is finished.
When ALL is lost, what can be found? Even bytes get lonely for a little bit! X-ray confirms Iam spineless!
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Present plan:
Install arch 0.5 in HDDB. Identical HDD to HDDA(which has arch 0.5 partitions).
Prepare image material for the partitions in HDDA using partimage program.
Apply restore to partitions in HDDB from image files in HDDA while booted in HDDA.
Partitions are identical in size, data is different but that is overwritten (including MBR) so that the HDDB becomers a clone of HDDA.
Install HDDB as the first boot disk and boot to HDDA kernel and data to verify cloning complete.
Any comment?
Prediction...This year will be a very odd year!
Hard work does not kill people but why risk it: Charlie Mccarthy
A man is not complete until he is married..then..he is finished.
When ALL is lost, what can be found? Even bytes get lonely for a little bit! X-ray confirms Iam spineless!
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The previous outline is predicated on having partimage utility installed in arch distro.
If this is not possible, forget the idea?
If it is possible, the image building capability is useful thereafter for keeping abreast of the changing arch distro by re-doing the image for back-up purposes, and it can be stored on other media as desired. The restore activity is provided only on the HDD having the utility installed but it appears that upon restore to a second HDD, the utility is therein loaded to the new HDD and can be utilized in that HDD as well.
The question is, can partimage be loaded into arch and executed therein?
Prediction...This year will be a very odd year!
Hard work does not kill people but why risk it: Charlie Mccarthy
A man is not complete until he is married..then..he is finished.
When ALL is lost, what can be found? Even bytes get lonely for a little bit! X-ray confirms Iam spineless!
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I had hoped to do a clone of the whole disc
Then boot from a rescue CD or floppy and use dd like kakabaratruskia said.
but haven't found any method which ensures a safe and sure clone
You're overanalyzing this. Just do it. There will always be some risk. Just try to be careful. Some things you will have to learn the hard way.
The sturgeon general says don't smoke fish
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In all the methods described in googling no mention is made of the swap partition.
I have had experience in Linux which caused loss of three HDD's up to this point. I have re-entered arch at least two dozen times due to ignorance of the ins and outs of arch and linux itself. I now have enough insight into linux to avoid the upgrade mixups which have occurred.
I pursue this carefully to avoid more trouble.
I have hopes to create a ram only linux LIVECD using 3G of available ram and this exercise is to prevent loss of any arch capability along the way by creating a clone first.
The most prevalent commodity in the world today is ignorance; so I seek information to slake my immersion in that commodity. This forum provides a panel for discussion and disclosure which I have engaged in on both counts.
Can partimage be utilized in arch linux?
Prediction...This year will be a very odd year!
Hard work does not kill people but why risk it: Charlie Mccarthy
A man is not complete until he is married..then..he is finished.
When ALL is lost, what can be found? Even bytes get lonely for a little bit! X-ray confirms Iam spineless!
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I used partimage, but could not compile it in arch. I had to download the binary.
And where were all the sportsmen who always pulled you though?
They're all resting down in Cornwall
writing up their memoirs for a paper-back edition
of the Boy Scout Manual.
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