USB booting :: Share DSL data between qemu & straight boot



Ok, as briefly as possible:  I have a 512MB USB drive that I've been massaging DSL-embedded (or 5way) on for about 4 months, and it is now completely and officially kicking @$$ up and down the block!!!  Boots up perfectly on my home machine, and runs all day on top of W2K pro on my work machine in qemu without a hitch.

I recently used qemu-img to create a new 128MB image file on the USB drive, which I then mounted under my qemu environment as a new hard disk (hdc).  I modified everything to use the new 'hdc' for all backup/restore and myDSL files, thereby eliminating the risk of running out of room on the stock 'hdb' disk image file, which would have made me very very sad and probably caused me to break nearly everything within reach.  And voila, it worked!

But then I got home and booted the USB drive directly, and quickly realized that all my configuration info and myDSL files under my new qemu environment don't show up to the direct-bootable DSL environment.

So, long story, but stupid simple question:  how/what do I modify so that the direct-boot DSL will recognize the new 'hdc' image file on my USB drive?  An mtab entry?  fstab?  The primary trick to getting it working on the qemu side was modifying "dsl-windows.bat" to assign the image file to a drive, but now I'm at a loss for what the analog would be on the direct-boot side.

Any suggestions?  I feel like it should be something extremely obvious, but so far not much about this project has been obvious, so I'll go ahead and publicly confess my ignorance/stupidity.

Thanks!
This is a really good question. First things first.
You would not want to share the same full backup as the machine specific setup for the virtual Qemu machine is surely different from you home machine.

However, it is possible to be creative to achieve your desired results.
First thing, separate out the qemu specific files from backup.tar.gz. That is remove all your user backup lines inside .filetool.lst and make a backup.tar.gz that is user file free. Next rename the backup.tar.gz to something else, like myQemu.tar.gz. Next put back all your user file lines into .filetool.lst and make another backup. Then you should have a myQemu.tar.gz and a backup.tar.gz. Now upon booting into qemu, first the myQemu.tar.gz will be restored folllowed by just your user files, i.e., machine independent.

On the real USB boot side, it is not quite as easy. Still the same concept applies. Have the backup.tar.gz for the real boot be only machine setting.

Now to access Qemu's virtual drive, you should boot DSL with the qemu option.

boot: dsl qemu

This will give you an fstab with /dev/harddisk /mnt/hdb

You can use the mount tool on hdb and see the contents of the virtual drive.
You can restore those user files from Qemu by using then prompt

#filetool.sh restore "" harddisk
or use the Backup/Restore GUI and enter harddisk and carefully press restore.
However, using this GUI option will persist your selection, which may or may not be what you want.

Same to backup user only file from real boot:
#filetool.sh backup "" harddisk

Using these concepts you should be able to  backup and restore your shared user only data files.
Cool, thanks very much for the help!   Too tired at this hour to get my brain around everything you suggest, but I'll give 'er a try over the long weekend, and report back on the results.

Thanks Again!!!
p0tp

original here.