System Reinstall Setup
I'm trying to set up a backup system using CD's. I was able to get the
system onto two CD's. I have partitions for /, /boot, /usr, /var, and
/home. I have a tar.gz for each partition, and saved each relative to .
- that is, for example, /boot is save in the fashion:
cd /boot; tar -czf blah . as are all the rest.
The idea was to, in the event of a total drive loss, to boot up a
Knoppix CD, manually fdisk ( or whatever), the partitions, and untar the
respective partitions back onto the HD. Yes, and in my case, this is
strictly a personal desktop with no network at all (except internet
outside)
However, even before I got the CD's constructed, it occurred to me that
Knoppix has the CD mounted, and I have only one CD. This wouldn't work
as I originally intended. And sure enough, this is the case -- my
single CD is locked and won't unmount..
So I'm wondering what would be the best method? I don't want to rely
upon a floppy boot disk. In my experience, those things fail faster
than you can write them.
1. Is there some way to use a Knoppix CD with only one CD drive?
2. Is a minimal Debian Installer feasible (more thoughts below)?
3. Tom's rtbt has a CD image of about 20Meg. Anyone have experience
with this? I would assume it mounts a minimal system onto a ramdisk?
4. Create my own Boot CD with a ramdisk?
5. Get a card reader and save a minimal image onto a card, whereby I
could boot the HD and finish the restore?
6. Yeah, the obvious, get a second CD...
Of course, one option for the case of a total system loss would be to
reinstall from scratch, but since I'm on dialup, this would not be the
happiest situation, or would it? Would the wise thing be to keep a
pretty up-to-date backup of /var/cache/apt/archives and restore it?
Then all one would have to do, I think, would be to use a fairly recent
netinstall CD and then go from there. Of course, my personal
configurations would be gone, but that could eventually be restored.
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