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Entry tags:
Linux > Ghost
I got the new hard drive, resisting the urge for a new PC. If I had recalled what a pain in the ass it is to open up my dinky little Mico-ATX PC cube box, I mightn't have resisted so hard.
After a couple of hours... yes, probably two bloody hours to do a fifteen minute job; it's sad but the box is that small. In my defense, I was also watching TV. Anyway, after time, cursing, and screw chasing, I have a new 320GB drive where the 200GB used to be. Of course, that's not the end of the procedure...
If I'd had one partition and drives of identical size, no worries. Note, if you ever have to upgrade a drive and want to keep your data, this is the simple way. Get a copy of Norton's Ghost and an external hard drive close to the same size as your source drive. Make a Ghost copy to the external drive. Stick in the new one, load the copy you made back. You may be thinking you can just copy all the files. Yes, you can, but don't try it with Windows.
My setup is not overly complex, but certainly not normal. Chopped into five partitions, 20G FAT32 for Windows OS, 20G ext3 for Linux OS, 512MB Linux Swap, 78G x 2 FAT32 for general storage.
Here is the point at which I'd like to say that Ghost has saved my butt, but it didn't. It worked fine with windows, but has some mental block with the Linux ext3. I have a tar.gz I made as well, will probably have to fail over to that. Next time I'm going to be a total Linux geek and just "dd if=/dev/hda1 .." the whole mess.
On the Linux geek front, if you have a dual boot system; note this:
The most common pain of multi boot systems is MBR breakdown, paired with the partition table shuffle. Keeping copies will save much pain, trust me.
Oh, one more piece of fun. At some point Microsoft, in its infinite marketing wisdom, backed off on FAT32's logical max size of 2TB and crippled it, only supporting 32GB. The only reason I can see is that they want to force the proprietary and quirky NTFS on Windows users. I will conform and keep my vfats in line.
After a couple of hours... yes, probably two bloody hours to do a fifteen minute job; it's sad but the box is that small. In my defense, I was also watching TV. Anyway, after time, cursing, and screw chasing, I have a new 320GB drive where the 200GB used to be. Of course, that's not the end of the procedure...
If I'd had one partition and drives of identical size, no worries. Note, if you ever have to upgrade a drive and want to keep your data, this is the simple way. Get a copy of Norton's Ghost and an external hard drive close to the same size as your source drive. Make a Ghost copy to the external drive. Stick in the new one, load the copy you made back. You may be thinking you can just copy all the files. Yes, you can, but don't try it with Windows.
My setup is not overly complex, but certainly not normal. Chopped into five partitions, 20G FAT32 for Windows OS, 20G ext3 for Linux OS, 512MB Linux Swap, 78G x 2 FAT32 for general storage.
Here is the point at which I'd like to say that Ghost has saved my butt, but it didn't. It worked fine with windows, but has some mental block with the Linux ext3. I have a tar.gz I made as well, will probably have to fail over to that. Next time I'm going to be a total Linux geek and just "dd if=/dev/hda1 .." the whole mess.
On the Linux geek front, if you have a dual boot system; note this:
# Backup Boot Records
dd if=/dev/hda of=backup-hda.mbr count=1 bs=512
dd if=/dev/hda1 of=backup-hda1.br count=1 bs=512
dd if=/dev/hda2 of=backup-hda2.br count=1 bs=512
# Backup Partition tables
sfdisk -d /dev/hda > backup-hda.sf
fdisk -l > backup-hda.fd
# Restore Boot Records
dd if=backup-hda.mbr of=/dev/hda
dd if=backup-hda1.br of=/dev/hda1
dd if=backup-hda2.br of=/dev/hda2
# Restore Partition tables
sfdisk /dev/hda < backup-hda.sfThe most common pain of multi boot systems is MBR breakdown, paired with the partition table shuffle. Keeping copies will save much pain, trust me.
Oh, one more piece of fun. At some point Microsoft, in its infinite marketing wisdom, backed off on FAT32's logical max size of 2TB and crippled it, only supporting 32GB. The only reason I can see is that they want to force the proprietary and quirky NTFS on Windows users. I will conform and keep my vfats in line.