Sunny wrote:

On 6/9/05, Christopher Shanahan wrote:

...

dd will work just fine for you. You can dd the entire disk -- the old one -- to your network share and then dd it back to your new disk. Use dd with a 32k block size and it'll work fast as well.

-- Christopher Shanahan

On the go. Will report back once I'm done.

Thanks Sunny

If you use dd, the old partition and the new one will be the same size, that's fine if that's what you need. Regards Sid. -- Sid Boyce ... Hamradio License G3VBV, Keen licensed Private Pilot Retired IBM Mainframes and Sun Servers Tech Support Specialist Microsoft Windows Free Zone - Linux used for all Computing Tasks

On Friday 10 June 2005 01:52, Sandy Drobic wrote:

partimage is free and does support NTFS though that support is still labeled experimental and with some reservations.

I have used partimage to save/restore NTFS (using a network server) and it went very well. But it was a freshly installed system. For NTFSes that "have been around" the experimental characteristic might apply :-) partimaged is daemon that starts a partimage server (no config required). Then boot with SUSE CD1 in rescue mode set up networking "ifconfig eth0 IP" mount a NFS export where you have partimage run partimage save partition or restore The partitions must be the same exact size.

On Tue, 2005-06-14 at 16:14, Sunny wrote:

OK, here is the summary:

{snip}

So, the solution was, as per Silviu Marin-Caea's and Mike McMullin's advice, I tried partimage. I did not used a server part for this. Just mounted the samba share, instructed partimage to create 2GB chunks, and of course to gzip the backup. After the partition backup, i did: dd if=/dev/hda of=mbr.img bs=512 count=1 to backup the MBR.

Then inserted the new HDD, and restored the MBR with dd if=mbr.img of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1

This as well restores the partition table.

Now, the problem was that partimage failed to restore. It segfaulted using the user interface, and using the command line complained that the target partition is 0 size and can not continue. I rebooted the machine, and now everything worked fine. I would really like to know what I needed to do in order to refresh the partition table without rebooting, but I couldn't find any info about this.

I've never had this problem Sunny. My only problem has been with the MBR though, and I fixed it (WinME) using fdisk /mbr, after that windows was usable, and I think I used the tols on the install disk (9.1) to fix grub as the boot loader.

Anyway ... I'm done. Memtest from SuSE install DVD is running (I added a new memory), and tomorrow I'll be all set with a new lappy (I hope :) )

Cheers and thanks for all the help

Best of luck Mike

On 6/16/05, Burkhard Carstens wrote:

Am Dienstag, 14. Juni 2005 22:14 schrieb Sunny: [..]

...

Now, the problem was that partimage failed to restore. It segfaulted using the user interface, and using the command line complained that the target partition is 0 size and can not continue. I rebooted the machine, and now everything worked fine. I would really like to know what I needed to do in order to refresh the partition table without rebooting, but I couldn't find any info about this.

hdparm -z (man hdparm)

greets Burkhard

Nice to know, thanks Sunny