quintaq@yahoo.co.uk wrote:
Hello,
To begin with an apology, the question I am going to ask is one which I would normally prefer to work out for myself, but I am a little nervous about the loss of much hard work and do not have much time at my disposal at the moment to do the research.
I have spent the last year learning and building my present linux installation on a 40GB HDD which has the following structure and which I will call the source drive:
/dev/hda1 /windows/C vfat rw,uid=500,gid=100 0 0 /dev/hda5 /boot ext2 defaults 1 2 /dev/hda6 swap swap defaults 0 2 /dev/hda7 / ext2 defaults 1 1
I am sorry about the Windows partiton, which is very little used but, for reasons I won't bore you with, it simply has to be there.
My objective is the simple one of keeping a clone of this HDD (lilo, Windows partition and all), such that if the source drive fails I can simply replace it with the clone, and restart. I am quite happy to invest in an identical drive for the purpose. I do not care if the cloning process takes some time to execute and may involve re-writing the clone in full each time I backup. There are obviously no space constraints because the drives will be identical.
I would like locate the clone as the second drive in a spare machine on my home network and I assume that I would begin by partitioning the clone so as to be identical to the source drive and mounting it under NTFS. If that is right, can anyone suggest the sequence of commands that should follow? If that is wrong, can anyone suggest a better approach?
Many thanks,
Yes you would need to partition the backup drive exactly the same as the master. Personally, (this is what I do) I would go out and get 2 removable cases for your drives so that I could easily move it in and out of where ever you might want. Then install it in your machine (master) as hdb and use dd to copy your partitions over. Like this: dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/dev/hdb1 bs=16k Do that for every partition but the swap partition. The swap partition should just be created once then you can leave that one alone. After you dd all the partitions, reconfig hdb to hda and plug it in. The VERY FIRST time you will need to boot from the install CD and choose boot installed system. Once it is up run lilo. You will only have to do this the first time and then only if you change your kernels or anything lilo related. Works like a charm for me and it doesn't matter if your using reiser/ext or what ever. Regards Mark -- Mark Hounschell dmarkh@cfl.rr.com