----- Original Message ----
From: Carlos E. R.
My system will not transition between runlevels properly (from single to RL1, using init 1 or shutdown -i1 -g0 now) just issues a long stream of errors...
That's a curious problem. I have always been able to switch modes.
Yes, but my install of 10.2 has never been very satisfactory frankly. It was almost impossible to install (10.0 and 10.1 flatly refused to install on this hardware. The install crashed before I could do anything. Even, as I recall, in "safe" mode. 10.2 installed, but has had a litany of problems that I never could get to the bottom of. 64 bit, dual core, with some funky (but Intel-supported) video. The video was the worst bit. Attempts to change mode (including "logout") universally lock the machine up. I have to hibernate, or forcibly power down.
fdisk -l shows slices fine, but is only useful to me if the device has already been mounted as it doesn't show unmounted anything.
fdisk -l should list all partitions regardless of the mount state.
Curious. Perhaps I did it wrong, but with the drive attached but not mounted, it didn't show up. Oh, but maybe that was in single user mode. Yes, must have been, because it auto-mounted in runlevel 1 anyway.
It does have a 4GB limit, so my original goal which was to be able to make a trivial copy of the /dev/sdb1 device using "dd" will require me to split the device into many slices.
No, no.
You can not do a "copy" of your linux filesystem to a fat filesystem. You need an external usb disk formatted in one of the native linux format: ext3, reiser, xfs...
Why?
One thing is the 4GB limit per file. There are worse things:
- permissions - ownership - hardlinks and softlinks - acl
none are supported by fat, so you will loose them in the backup, and the restore operation will fail to restore a working system, unless you save a list of all that things on another file and have a script to recreate them.
Actually, "yes, yes" :) This bit I'm entirely confident of, but I don't think you understood quite what I meant. I am doing this: dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/media/USB_DRIVE/HUGE_IMAGE_FILE.dat bs=128M So, what I'm saying is that I literally make an image of the partition. Not copy the files. That way I can simply use dd to restore my exact machine. It's quite a handy technique for this kind of thing. I use it if a drive is failing, or a machine is about to undergo serious soft-or-hardware surgery. Just gives you a spare image. I have CDs burned with entire windows-95 installations made that way too (boot linux on CD, copy the partition, then do the same to restore it if necessary. Very handy in a teaching situation like mine). You're right, of course about the 4GB limit, but that just requires some careful arithmetic to split the image across extents. Haven't had to do that since floppy disks come to think of it (yes, this is my first machine I've treated this way with partitions greater than a DVD). Thanks again for all the input and suggestions. I think I'm going to have a look into rcopy, cpio, and maybe tar. It would be nice to have a file-level copy that's properly sound too/instead. Cheers, Simon ____________________________________________________________________________________ Be a better friend, newshound, and know-it-all with Yahoo! Mobile. Try it now. http://mobile.yahoo.com/;_ylt=Ahu06i62sR8HDtDypao8Wcj9tAcJ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org