Re: back up and lilo

[hugo vanwoerkom <hvw59601@care2.com>]

Hans wrote:
> Happy Easter,
>
> I want to experiment a little bit with my system. Before that I want to 
> back up my stable system to another partition, in case I mess up. What 
> is the smartest way to do that and how do I change lilo.conf so that I 
> can boot in to both partitions?
>
> E.g. stable system on /dev/hda3 --> back up to /dev/hda7. Lilo points to 
> /dev/hda3 as Debian and to /dev/hda7 as Debian_backup.
>
> Thanks for the help.
>
> Hans

I use 2 methods of backup: mondo and partimage.

Mondo backs up  CD's (R or RW) that can be booted and I prefer it 
because it doesn't depend on your HD.

Another advantage is that it is portable: you can take that CD and boot 
it on a different architecture. I always use mondoarchive before I do 
dist-upgrade.

Also you can archive the partition you are running on.

Partimage is faster but not portable and you cannot backup the partition 
that is mounted.

Just point lilo to where the partition is, e.g.:

image=/hdb6/vmlinuz
	label=hdb6-2c-22
	root=/dev/hdb6
	append="hdc=ide-scsi apm=on dumbcon=2 ddcon=1"
	vga=9
	read-only
image=/vmlinuz
	label=hdb1-2c-22
	root=/dev/hdb1
#	initrd=/initrd.img
	append="hdc=ide-scsi apm=on dumbcon=2 ddcon=1"
	vga=9
	read-only

So on partition hdb6 the image is vmlinuz on the root device and on 
partition hdb1 also.

Hugo