On Sat, Aug 9, 2008 at 1:56 AM, mourik jan c heupink <heupink@merit.unu.edu> wrote:
What you guys are telling me is that thereś nothing like "Norton Ghost" that will work with Linux software RAID?
Take a look at clonezilla [http://www.clonezilla.org/]
mj
Wow. Thanks for that clonzilla clue. That is a sweet package. A little rough around the edges, but quite usable. I've been trying to clone older specialized machines into Vmware machines and Vmware's own tools for this will not run on old platforms, and requires you to install software on the old-platform. Some of the machines I want to clone only exist as single hard-drives, the actual computer is long gone. Clonezilla allowed me to clone these fairly easily, temporarily parking the image to my linux server (via ssh), then booting an empty vmware machine with clonezilla and installing the cloned copy there-in. The only tricky bit was getting the exact same number of total sectors in the virtual disk as the real one or the image fails to boot. (invalid system disc, insert disk and press any key) You can only really be sure of this by using the command line vmware-vdiskmanager to set te exact number of sectors. Procedure: (Posted here to feed the spiders.....) 1) Use Clonezilla CD to clone the disk to server via ssh from the real hardware. 2) step into the bios and write down total number of actual sectors, cylinders heads and sectors per cylinder. 3) Create a virtual machine. But don't boot it. 4) exit vmware and open a dos box/Shell in the directory where the virtual machine is stored. 5) use vmware-vdiskmanager to manually create a disk in that directory using the actual values for total sectors as the size parameter: vmware-vdiskmanager -c -a ide -s 123456789sectors -t 2, where 123456789 = the total number of sectors of your real disk and the -t disk type matches your disk type. 2=preallocate. Optionally you can boot the VM with a windows disk and escape to a shell and type fdisk /mbr at this point. 6) restart vmware and edit it to use this manually created disk as ide 0, deleting the first disk (and the file that contains it). 7) set the VM's CDrom to the Clonezilla disk or the ISO there of. 8) boot the VM machine. It should boot from the cdrom, if not go into the bios of the virtual machine, and adjust the boot device to be the cdrom first. (F2 Immediately). 9) When booting into Clonezilla, set it to restore from the ssh server , and to not install grub (unless you need it), and to use the CHS figures from the backup. Select option to not overwrite the mbr if you put it on above. The Cloned VMs booted first time. -- ----------JSA--------- Someone stole my tag line, so now I have this rental. N§˛ćěr¸yéZ)z{.ąďŽËąĘâmę)z{.ąę+Z+i×bś*'jW(f§vÇŚj)hĽéěşÇž éi˘§˛ë ˘¸