Re: backing up before debian install

["vinai" <vroopcha@mcw.edu>]

> 1. is it OK for debian and OS X if I just shrink the OS X partition
>    using partman, and put an ext3 filesystem partition after it?  Or
>    should I put it before, etc, or the whole thing is not relevant?

I'm not sure.  There was a discussion on this list sometime within the
last couple of months on this topic.  I THINK partman can resize a HFS+
partition, but not with journaling enabled.  Check the thread to make
sure.

> 2. before using partman, I would like to make a backup of the whole
>    disk.  What tools do you suggest for that?
>
>    I can now boot the sarge netinstall cd (current, daily release) and
>    mount partitions on my firewire/usb2 OWC 250 gb drive.  I thought
>    of making a backup into a file on one of the partitions, using the
>    tools on the sarge install disk.  Is this feasible?  What tools
>    should I use?  I thought of dd, but I don't know how could I make
>    it compare the data it has written with the disk, and I don't know
>    which device name to use for the whole disk (not just a partition).
>    If things don't work out, will I be able to restore from this?

If you want to make a fully functional backup of your mac os x system,
I would recommend looking at Carbon Copy Cloner from Mike Bombich (I
think his website is bombich.com).  It is donation-ware, but I've used
it for the last year to year and a half to backup my laptop drive to an
external firewire drive.  It can create bootable partitions, complete
disk images of existing partitions that can be backed up to CD or DVD,
but not bootable disk images.  Last time I checked, I think the site
said it was for OS X 10.2, but I've successfully used it on 10.3.x for
the last few months, and it still seems to work.

cheers
vinai