Hard drive frugal install loses all files between

Forum: HD Install
Topic: Hard drive frugal install loses all files between
started by: jfdutcher

Posted by jfdutcher on April 26 2006,00:10

Please help ...I completed a frugal install to the harddrive and it works well.

But between every boot my newly created PPP connection item is gone, all bookmarks are gone (Firefox), all downloaded files (say, to the 'desktop')
are gone. In the case of the ISP connection the configure exercise states that it is saving the connection to a directory like: /etc/ppp/chatscripts/xxxxx or something like that. But at next boot time it's gone and I have to re-create just to get back on the internet. Again any saved bookmarks are gone...and files too.
How do I prevent this

There seems to be a /ramdisk..... directory 'underneath' the /etc directory making me think that the connection is not under
/ramdisk directly which I presume would be a bad thing.........

Posted by mikshaw on April 26 2006,02:04

Frugal is in essence the same as a live CD....if you do nothing to change its default startup and shutdown behavior, the system will return to its original state.

In order to keep your changes, you must save those changes in a persistent location outside of the DSL filesystem. The most commom way to do this is with DSL's backup/restore feature. You must specify a partition for the backup. If you do this properly, and if you tend to shut down or reboot properly, the backup will occur automatically each time you shut down or reboot.

The backup gui is available in the "system" section of your desktop menu, and i believe it's also available through the DSL control panel. When you start the backup tool, you will be presented with a text field in which to enter the partition you desire for the backup. You must enter the partition without a path. In other words, if your target partition is /dev/hda1, you would type in hda1. Once the partition is accepted, your backup/restore is activated. You can also use this tool to make additional backups or restore from arbitrary backup files.

The backup itself is composed of files and directories listed in /home/dsl/.filetool.lst. Any string listed in /home/dsl/.xfiletool.lst, which isn't also specified explicitly in .filetool.lst, will be ignored.

If the target partition is not the same as the partition where DSL resides, or if you have multiple backups on multiple partitions, you may need to specify dsl restore=<partition> in the configuration file of your bootloader.

Posted by kerry on April 26 2006,10:03

Can't we just put / in /home/dsl/.filetool.lst to have it save the whole set up, as if it were a snapshot and have it restore back to it's exact state upon boot up?

Posted by pr0f3550r on April 26 2006,12:19

/ does not contain the whole system, only the base of it.
You don't really want to carry with you the whole system around when most of it are static files.

However, other projects, not DSL, are experimenting with squashfs to perform a whole writable system but DSL developers have beasically rejected the idea, not that I advocate this anyway (search!)

Posted by torp on April 26 2006,12:51

i had this same problem for a long time, and was either too dense, or to blinded by my winblows experience to see.....but i found my answer in grub's menu.lst. the following lines (with a few machine specific cheatcodes) saved the day for me...

Quote

#title DSL with mydsl, restore, persistentancy, hostname, and passwords
#kernel /boot/linux24 root=/dev/hda2 quiet vga=normal noacpi noapm noscsi frugal dma toram mydsl=hda3 restore=hda3 home=hda3 opt=hda3 host=DSL1 secure
#initrd /boot/minirt24.gz

once i modified my menu.lst and created persistent home, opt and mydsl persistency on the apprpriate drive it all fell into place. finally i place my .dsl and .uci files in "/" of the persistant drive and viola!

torp