On 2014-03-30 21:09, Carl Hartung wrote:
WRT 'most rescue disks are short on tools', I have not experienced this in recent years. I use three 'rescue' tools on a regular basis:
Try the "openSUSE rescue live stick", preferably the 13.1 version. It is not installable, doesn't have "office" tools, so it fits in a CD size. In 12.3 the persistent filesystem on stick does not work, but in 13.1 it does, and you can install some extra tools you may need. I find it pretty neat :-)
3) Clonezilla boot CD, primarily used for backing up (cloning) non-Linux partitions.
I recently backed up a full disk (small) via network, using clonezilla. I was using my old laptop, with a pentium 4, and with the default options which include heavy compression, and working over ssh, it was quite slow. I had to setup NFS, and not use clonezilla defaults, so that I could choose the compression method: z3 (lzop) seems to be the optimal one. I found its NFS setup quite dumb: although I had prepared an NFS export for this usage, it instead choose the first exported directory it found on the server, ignoring the specified path. If you tell clonezilla to backup an entire disk, it appears to backup the partition layout using several methods, and it also stores a number of sectors beyond the partition table, the ones where grub is actually stored. This is nice, if it works. -- Cheers / Saludos, Carlos E. R. (from 13.1 x86_64 "Bottle" at Telcontar)