Topic: Restore (or clone) a 5.6 system

[Eric]

I have an existing 5.6 sytems that I'd like to move entiredly to a new
server.  Since I won't be moving the hard drive(s) I'd like to back up
the existing server's filesystem and just restore it on the new
system thus preserving my customizations, user data, settings,
etc.  Does anybody have any experience with a move like this?

I know I'd have to run lilo to tell the system where
it's boot and initrd information is after I restored the file system.
Also, the ethernet cards are different so I'd have to run the
e-smith configuration (logging in as admin).

What else is there to do? I'm troubled by the issue of the new
hardware not having an installed system so how can I load the
tape that is the snapshot of the "old" system.  Am I thinking about
this the wrong way?

Eric

[guestHH]

Maybe this topic helps:

http://www.tech-geeks.org/article.php?story=20030507102947786

Regards,
guestHH

[Michael Smith]

Cheap & available w/Norton Systemworks ... Norton Ghost is your pal here.  When you've cloned the drive, just rerun the install (or upgrade) to get the hardware set up correctly.

[toby]

Is there any trick to using Ghost with Ext2 or Ext3. I am quite familiar with ghost using the enterprise version to rollout and maintain our Windows clients on our AD network but when I have tried with sme have had problems ghosting to a larger disk than the original.

[Michael Smith]

I've successfully Ghosted ext2 w/Ghost 2002, have never tried ext3.  Ghost recognized the /, /boot & /swap partitions & allowed me to resize as I liked.  The last time I did this was with SME 5.1.2, I should note ... as always, YMMV.

[Tom Keiser]

I, too, have been playing with Ghost, and others in attempting to settle on a way of imaging my linux disks.

Generally, you do much better with Ghost Corporate ($hundreds) than Ghost personal ($50). Also, you need at least vers 7.5 or 2003 if you are going to work with ext3 (SME 5.6).  Finally, my experience with Ghost across a network has been terrible: you can send an image in minutes, but restoring it can take 20+ hours. YMMV.

One package that does work (sort of) is Novastor's Instant Recovery.
http://www.no-panic.com/recovery/irecover.html
It boots an unnamed Linux off a CD, then makes or restores images or simply clones drives.  The expensive "network" version doesn't have many supported NICs, and doesn't work very well on those it does support. When I called to ask about my network errors, I was told they "don't support networking" with this product, so I recommend you just buy the cheap one. ($39)

They claim to support recovery to larger drives, but I have not tried that. My "trick" is to always use an SME boot drive, and a separate RAID array for data (mounted as /home/e-smith/files/). As boot drives are always much larger than needed, after installing, I shrink the "/" partition on SME boot drive down to 1GB or so, using Partition Magic 8 (which works with ext3). After that, making or restoring an image (to the RAID data array) can be done in a few minutes, and takes very little space. (I store the image in "primary"). Your image can be written to most any filesystem, and includes the boot sector and all partitions.

I've also had occasion to use this method on other Linux's, including those on Reiserfs, and it works well.

T.

[ryan]

This week I read about G4U, ghost 4 unix on sourcforge.  It looks pretty simple and claims to do a sector copy of a harddrive which allows for any OS.  I have not used it yet, but plan to play with it soon.  All you need to provide is an FTP server and some floppies.

ryan

[Spottydog]

Hi

I had a play with g4u last week and it worked for me. I wanted to upgrade my server  hardware and didn't have access to GHOST. There is also an option in g4u to do a copy disk to disk. So I tried that. I installed the old server HD in the new server as the secondary IDE drive did a copy md1 md0 (g4u command) and 10 minutes later it had finished. All I had to do then was change the network cards to match the new Hardware and all done. The partition size doesn't take up all the HD at present so will need to resize to complete the task.

[ryan]

Spottydog,

How many changes with the motherboard, cpu, bus, video, etc...can SME handle using disk imaging?  Will kudzu recognize all new hardware and simply boot the server?  I would expect a kernel panic if a lot of hardware changes are made...such as building SME on an old Gateway PC, then imaging it to a new Dell PowerEdge server.

ryan

[Jon]

I moved from a PII 333 Celeron processor (clone PC) to a AMD XP athlon 2 GIG Machine and all was ok (surprised me) . I'm not sure how far you can push it but I guess you won't know until you try.