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Re: Moving and Repartitioning



> 
> What are the best ways to do this ?
> 
> I thought of:
> 
> a) creating a gzipped tarfile on my jaz-drive (1 Gb, so I can't just copy it)
>    (drawback: tar seems to have some quirks in that it doesn't always
>     correctly restores permissions)
> b) reinstalling (drawback: needs reconfiguring too, things may accidentally
>    be left out)
> c) using a backupprogram that allows compressed backups to the Jaz, then
>    repartitioning, then restoring.
> 
> Any ideas ?
> 

This is a good question indeed.  Actually, I just did this type
of thing myself 2 days ago.. and it actually went quite successfully
(with a couple of hic-cups that I finally ironed out).  But,
I managed to back-up all my linux stuff, repartition, and then
reinstall everything.  And so far, everything appears to be
working exactly the way I had it before.

The way I did it was to use cpio to backup all of my linux stuff.
I did come into a snag since I also made a backup of my /proc
directory (which you shouldn't really make a backup off because
that is just process memory I believe).  So, during my reinstall
it hung when it got to the /proc directory.  Fortunately, there
are ways with cpio to specify which files to restore so I just
restored everything except for /proc.  The entire way that I
did it is as follows:
	a)  used cpio to back everything up (except /proc)
	b)  repartition
	c)  install base linux system
           did this just to have a shell that I could reinstall
           my backup
	d)  make boot disk and boot into linux
	e)  used cpio to reinstall stuff

Now, I don't know if this is the best approach.  It might be
better to just execute a shell from the linux installation
screen, mount the partition you want, and then use cpio to
reinstall your backup.  I'm not positive about the cpio options,
but, this might be a problem if you did a cpio backup
which include the "/" at the beginning (which I unfortunately
did).  I think if I were to do it again I would use cpio
but instead backup the root directory by naming each of the
directories instead of using "/".

Also, for my setup I'm using loadlin so I had to change the
root partition device.

After all this, everything works great with no problems!

Good luck!
Richard..

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Richard Dansereau
Email: rdanse@pobox.com          Home page:  http://pobox.com/~rdanse
Electrical and Computer Engineering - University of Manitoba - Canada
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