swm wrote:
On Tuesday 20 March 2007 11:00, Douglas Allan Tutty wrote:I have a 486 with 32 MB ram, ISA bus NIC, currently running Sarge. Now that Etch RC2 is out I'm starting to plan for the future of this box. The Etch install manual says that it needs 64 MB ram. I know that Sarge will continue to be supported for a while but I may as well start planning.[snip]I want a distribution with security support since if I didn't want that I could just stick with Woody. DamnSmallLinux needs to boot from a CD. The 486 will only boot from floppy or hard drive. FreeBSD will run, does anyone have experience with it? Thanks, Doug.I use Slackware 9.1 on a Pentium 166 with 32MB of RAM. Security updates are still being provided for releases back to 9.0.The Slackware web site indicates that they still support the 486. http://www.slackware.com/install/sysreq.phpI take this to mean that even Slackware 11.0 can run on a 486. You probably would want to use the default 2.4.33.3 kernel rather than the optional 2.6.x kernels due to memory limitations.My system was installed from a CDROM that I borrowed from another computer then removed afterwards. It now boots from a floppy as the BIOS hangs when trying to boot from the large, modern hard drive.
Most large modern hard drives have a jumper to limit the capacity at 32GB, so get a big drive to use as a backup, jumper it down to 32GB, use DD to pull your the contents of your old Hdds over (you'll probably want to do this on the newer machine) then update /etc/fstab if, as with OP your coming from more than one drive, boot of the new drive and upgrade to Etch safe in the knowledge that your not tinkering with the live system
It's not a waste of money and your not blowing $40 on a Hdd for your ancient PC as when your done use the new drive as a storage drive for backups, I've got an old 120GB 5000RPM WD drive sitting on the shelf with a USB IDE adapter that has backups of the MBR of various computers, NTFS images of the girlfriends laptop, bla bla bla, it's saved my skin more than once.
BACKUP MBR dd if=/dev/hda of=./mbr.ddimg bs=446 count=1 backs up MBR dd if=/dev/hda of=./mbr.ddimg bs=512 count=1 backs up MBR and partition table. RESTORE MBR dd if=./mbr.ddimg of=/dev/hda restors up MBR NTFS LOCAL BACKUP ntfsclone -s -o - /dev/hda1 | gzip -9 -c > backup.ntfscloneimg.gz LOCAL RESTORE gunzip -c backup.ntfscloneimg.gz | ntfsclone -r -O /dev/hda1 -What do people use for mirroring Linux partitions, tar probably but is there a better tool?
Why is it better? Good luck