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Topic: Just the few last things< Next Oldest | Next Newest >
Daxziz Offline





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Posted: Mar. 08 2005,11:50 QUOTE
Right I thought as much as I was in the wrong direction regarding the splash screen.

Anyway.. I tried using G4L and that gave me the exact same problem as Norton Ghost gives me.

Now I'm so far that I can do a copy of the harddisk including MBR and all that, but when it boots, it makes a Kernel Panic because it can't mount the disk at hdc1. I saw that it had been renamed to hda1 after Norton and tought I could play smart and made a new boot entry in GRUB where I set it to boot from hda instead. This sorta works actually, but it gives me an error saying that the sector is incorrect or damaged and that I should run a fsck or e2fsck - doing so passes everything and I can actually start X or an X application from command line, but rebooting brings me to the exact same problem with running fsck.

I'm of the belief right now that if only I could fix the new hda install which I've ghosted over from the hdc1 computer, and remove the unneeded stuff like the entry which goes to hdc1 in GRUB for in the end making a new Ghost Image of this harddrive, Norton would not name the harddrive different and the partitions would stay the same so even if Norton renamed'em to the same, DSL would still be able to boot next time since it would be the same.

Am I smoking something or could this workout ?

It's quite a problem making it the dd way for me :( No extra harddrive and nowhere exactly to put it 'cept a share on a 2k server... and then.. how would one restore it to the new computer in a fast way ?


-Daxziz
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cbagger01 Offline





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Posted: Mar. 09 2005,03:07 QUOTE
I don't really understand what your issue is with booting, but I can answer the last question.

You CAN store an image on a Win2K server.  Just install the samba package and mount the MSWindows network share and then "dd" your image file over to that location.

Restoration is the reverse of the installation... Boot from the DSL livecd and then "dd" your image back to the new computer's hard drive.

With a 100Mbit network, it should go pretty fast provided that  
(1) Your partition isn't too big
(2) You use "gzip -1" or "gzip -2" compression to shrink the image file.
(3) You zero out the unused space on your partition by creating a big file full of zeros and then delete this file.  For a linux or vFAT partition, you can use "dd" or "cat" to do this.  For an NTFS partition, boot into Windows and download and install a utility like "zapfree" to zero out your unused disk space.

Keep in mind that two EXACT cloned computers on the same network can cause problems like duplicate machine names and duplicate Windows IDs that must be overcome by the knowledgable sysadmin.

Good Luck.
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Daxziz Offline





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Posted: Mar. 10 2005,09:33 QUOTE
The idea is great but sadly I have some issues regarding this too.. perhaps it's best that I tell you what computers I'm actually working with here.

It's all Pentium 166 MHz machines, 32-64 MB RAM and all 2 GB HD. Around 3 actually has a CD-Rom drive, the rest ( around 50 ) doesn't.

The system I've currently build up is based on one of those with a CD-Rom drive ( of course ). This computers harddisk has then been ghosted / imaged by using Nortons RAW function for drive copying. This also works when the target machine recieves the image EXCEPT that the partitions are renamed... this is where I said that the source machine has hdc1 as the partition and the target machine gets hda1. It's clear when the 2 systems boot that the partitions are NOT the same.
So if I could just find a way to setup the system so when it is ghosted, it is ghosted right. Sadly this doesn't seems be that easy or possible. When I say easy I think easy like ghosting a Windows harddisk.

So my problem with dd'ing the system from the source to a server, like you suggested, is not a problem... the problem comes when I have to ghost one of the machines which doesn't have a CD-Drive to boot DSL with :(

I've been playing with the idea of copying the DSL CD onto the server and then start the CD over the server with a bootfloppy or something from the target machine. With a little playing, I should be able to write an extra part of the installer script so it copies some modified files over to the HD AFTER it has made the actual DSL install. But it seems a little heavy to do this IMO.

Suggestions are very welcome.


-Daxziz
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aveline Offline





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Posted: Mar. 10 2005,10:08 QUOTE
try QParted I think its called ... it has a utility called PartImage that will make an image file of your partition itself.

aveline
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Daxziz Offline





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Posted: Mar. 10 2005,11:33 QUOTE
Right :) I'll download Knoppix and see if I can drag use of its version of this utility. If it works I'll have to find a solution for the computers without CD-Drives :S

Thx everybody for trying to help me out on this :)

-Daxziz
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