Persistent home on hdb + GRUB on hda

Forum: HD Install
Topic: Persistent home on hdb + GRUB on hda
started by: ugol

Posted by ugol on Mar. 29 2006,12:50

Hi everybody,
Summary: a student of mine has an old PC at home with a little space space on both hda1 and hdb1. There are not other partitions.
I suggested her to put a copy of a remastering I did (starting from DSL 2.1) on hda1 as a "poor man's install" and she'll do it. Since she's not very skilled with Linux, I don't want to suggest her to repartition the primary disk in order to not give her too many troubles.

First question: can she do an automatic backup of her home files to/from the secondary disk? It seems to me to remember that DSL perhaps can't do it, but I'm not sure. I've googled a little this morning, but I've not found any answer.

Of course, she can just try, but since students do a lot of strange mistakes, I'll not sure about her tests.

Second question: in order to make faster the boot process, it would be nice to use GRUB in order to write on the MBR of hda. There is another topic in this area, saying that a link in the wiki page to a file for putting GRUB on a floppy is no more working.
Is it possible to settle the MBR by working from the live CD (or from the "poor man's install")? Do I need grub.dsl? I don't think so, because the GRUB-frugal install works, so there must be a way ....

Many thanks for your help,
ciao,
Ugo

Posted by ugol on Mar. 29 2006,13:55

OK! I didn't think too much before writing...
I had a look to the frugal_grub.sh script in the /usr/sbin directory and I've more or less understood what I've to do in order to rewrite the MBR of hda by using GRUB.

Thus, erase the second question of the previous e-mail.
The first one is still valid....

Ciao,
Ugo

Posted by mikshaw on Mar. 29 2006,16:14

DSL has had automatic backup of /home/dsl for a long time (automatic in the sense that once you define a target partition it will be automatic). The file /home/dsl/.filetool.lst stores paths that will be included, and /home/dsl/.xfiletool.lst stores strings that will be excluded from the backup.

You can optionally use the boot parameter "home=hdb1" to use a persistent home instead of the backup. I'm not sure what limitation there is on filesystems for the persistent partition, but it should be a linux filesystem if you don't want file ownership/permissions to be screwed up. Reiserfs or ext3 work well...ext2 needs fairly regular maintenance if you will be writing to it frequently.