[plug] "Ghost" for Linux?

[Nick Bannon]

On Thu, Oct 05, 2000 at 08:03:10AM +0000, Trevor Phillips wrote:
> I think I remember seeing a month or two ago about an app for Linux similar to
> Ghost. ie; Back up & restore partition information for linux & windows
> partitions.

There's lots of options depending on what exactly you want to do.

Starting with Ghost - I think it might handle Linux partitions 
perfectly well.

Simply saving/restoring partitions is easy - dd. If the partition _table_
is all you need, you only need the first 512 byte block, in fact. (check
the LILO manual, or "dd if=/dev/hda of=/floppy/MBR bs=512 count=1" to back
up a copy to /floppy)

You can copy whole /dev/hda1 type partitions with dd, you can resize
them with parted, you can try to rebuild a broken partition table with
gpart.

The best option is probably to backup (you were already doing this in
preparation for fiddling with your partitions, right?) and restore
after changing drives/partitions/filesystems. You can use
dump/restore/tar/cpio or others.

Two automated installtion systems (like Ghost) are ;
http://systemimager.sourceforge.net/
http://jacal.sourceforge.net/

...and now you've replied and added http://partimage.sourceforge.net/
to the list. ::-) Sourceforge is getting pretty popular these days...

The backup is still my suggestion. If you want to try one of these
after doing the backup - go ahead, you've got nothing to lose. ::-)

Nick.

-- 
  Nick Bannon  | "I made this letter longer than usual because
nick at it.net.au | I lack the time to make it shorter." - Pascal