Topic: Disk clone advice?

[NoTo]

Hi All,

I need some advice on cloning a hard disk. I have an ancient (in IT terms) Netgear ND508 NAS drive that contains an 8 gig disk and obviously it's pretty usless capacith these days. The disk runs a Linux OS of unknown origins and basically boots up and shares out drive space.

I have been able to ascertain the partitions as being 157Mb ext2 (operating system), 7.84Gb (data shares) and 39Mb (swap).

The NAS box is headless, so how would I go about cloning the OS and putting it all onto a bigger disk, if indeed that's likely to be possible?

Many thanks for any pointers.

Graham

[MSmith]

Can't speak directly to your Netgear, unfortunately, but have done something similar with a small Snapgear server.  It involved using "dd" to copy the OS part of the drive to a new, larger drive (obviously connecting both to a standard PC), then booting the new drive and issuing certain commands to format the larger partition.  Worked a treat, but I was "standing on the shoulders of giants" as I'd Googled furiously for a solution.

And thus, Googling for "ND508":

http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/misc/6116-netgear-nd508.html

Another guy put Trustix 3.0.5 on a 320-gig HDD and it worked:

http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/misc/6116-netgear-nd508.html

If it's working now, I think I'd try to find the latest firmware and upgrade that before doing anything else.

Adding "trustix" to the google terms gives lots more results.  Seems that Trustix works because, unlike most distros, it doesn't halt if no video hardware exists.

Good luck and post your result!

[NoTo]

Oh wow, thankyou! That looks like hours of fun all on its own

I'll report back as requested

[NoTo]

I am happy to report 100 percent success

Trustix was going ok, but I soon ran into the brick wall that is my Linux skills! I fell over at the installing webmin part, and just got frustrated. I then started looking at NAS distros and had a go with FreeNAS which looked like it would work, but when I transferred the hard disk into the NAS, it wouldn't boot.

The NAS is a Cyrix 200MHz with 16Mb RAM, VIA chipset and RTL8139 LAN adaptor, all built in a single headless board.

Eventually came across NASLite at http://www.serverelements.com/ and encouraged by the reports it will run headless without a vid card, I gave it a shot. Installed it on a 250Mb disk hooked up to a desktop with similar chipset and NIC. Upgraded the NAS to 128Mb with an old PC100 stick I found in the garage. Once I transferred the hard disk into the NAS, it booted first time and is fully functional. Runs like a charm. The whole install is really tiny. The downside is no user management etc etc and security is nowhere. However, this device is well behind the firewall and will be used for backing up the SME server only. NASLite is a mix of open source and commercial so had to pay for it, but at 29 dollars (16 quid) it was well worth it to keep the NAS going a while longer.

I have lost the functionality offered by the LEDs ont he front of the NAS (disk remaining capacity, Ready, etc) but that's not something to lose sleep over I reckon.

Cheers,
Graham