Laptops :: Automated Restore from USB Drive



Hello all, I am new to this board, and am working with DSL on a Toshiba 4015CDS, and use a Dell 64 MB usb drive.
Here is the procedure I now use to restore:
First, when DSL boots up, I open a terminal, and sudo su
Then I
#mount /dev/sda1 -t ext2 /mnt/usbdrive
Now I can go to the menu, and click on File Restoration > Restore.
I have Mozilla Firebird 7, and it takes a short while for all of that to
restore.
Then I go to Menu > Enhance > Icons and when the icons are on the desktop, I have one for MozillaFirebird.
I use the opened terminal that I used to mount the usbdrive (above) to connect to the internet with wvdial.
That works very well, but I wonder if anyone has a quicker or easier way to do all that.
I'm not running DSL on a Hard Drive, I
use the Live CD, as I am not permitted by the owner to partition this Drive..     :laugh:
I am curious as to why you usb device has an ext2 partition?
The standard is vfat. If you change the partition back to vfat, then the liveCD system will work easier for you. You will be able from the first boot prompt to use:

knoppix restore        or even better if you have the memory
knoppix restore toram

If you like the icons,  uncomment the enhance line (delete the '#' )  in .xinitrc
Once that is backed up on the usb device, then you can boot into a fully restored and enhanced desktop. As for the dial-up there are some changes in the works there too.
I'm going to try that. As I think this thru, I have to leave this machine running with DSL on it, and remove the stick I have, and get it formatted to vfat on another machine. Before I do that, I need to save my filetool.lst to a floppy, so I can copy it back to the newly formatted vfat memory stick. That filetool.lst has the instructions I'll need to make the first .gz backup file. The other backup plan is to copy the files to /dev/hda1, and I can get them back if need be. Currently,  my .gz file  is about 11 MB, as I have MozillaFirebird. If I reboot in  this machine, to Windows 98, I can do the format to vfat, but then I lose my DSL add-on's and configurations. I have a Windows XP box, but that probably cannot do a vfat format. XP will automatically recognize the memory stick without additional drivers, but Windows 98 can't, and needs a driver. I have that on this machine, but I gotta plan carefully,  of course.
I had heard about Knoppix Restore, and tried it, but it didn't work, apparently because of the ext2 fs.  :;):
I couldn't get it to work. I copied my usb files to the windows partition for safekeeping while I reformatted the usb drive to vfat in Windows 98. Then, while I was booted into win98, I copied the files back to the memory stick.
Then I rebooted into DSL, and tried to mount the stick with both  of these lines:
#mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/usbdrive
that didn't work, said "it's not a valid block device"
so I tried:
#mount /dev/sda1 -t vfat /mnt/usbdrive
That didn't work either. So, in a terminal I went to /sbin, and
#mkfs /dev/sda1 (That puts an ext2 fs on the stick)
Then I copied my saved backup.tar.gz and filetool.lst from /dev/hda1,
and was then able to mount the drive and restore.
No idea why it would not work, but looking over my notes, I find that
the stick was used in a windows XP machine, and that I could not mount it
the first time around, so decided to format it to ext2 fs. That worked.
I tried anyway, the possibility to use knoppix restore at the boot prompt was
worth the effort, and no harm was done.   :laugh:
The system was designed to have a totally automated restore from sda1 and vfat. When you buy the device it normally sda1 and vfat. I could not automate writing to a device that is sda1 and ext2 because that would be more likely a real live scsi disk. I would have to prompt for the device and then that is another boot question that I am trying to avoid. I use my usb vfat device for a hands free restore of Mozilla, bash_profile, xsetup, monkey and its files, and all that.

My question for you, is that when you formatted it in Win98 did make a partition? Some devices can be formatted with no partition. It would then be mounted as /dev/sda  That still would not allow for total automation. You would have to make a partition and then format it. Like I said when you purchase a device they usually come pre-formatted and partitioned as sda1 and vfat.

Also, be aware that you should not use the usb device as a real hard drive. They have a limited write ability same as flash devices. Using it as a live drive will shorten its life considerably and failure will occur without warning. Then it is unuseable. This has been discussed on this board. Also there is an article about such in the Decemeber Linux Journal, "Floppies for the New Millennium" which discusses the proper use of usb devices. That is the other reason why the backup restore script is the way it is. It treats usb devices like a super big floppy.
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