Disk to disk backup -- Click and Clone halts in Ghost For Linux (g4l)

[loninappleton]

I have enough stuff working on my Fedora Core2 setup that I want to make adisk to disk
backup.


The master is a 15 g Western Digital, the slave is a 5G WD.


At bootup of FC2 the slave drive shows to be not mounted because it has a duplicate
boot routine on it. At one time that drive was a duplicate master.


When I run g4l it does not tell me much. I get to the scree that says 'everything on the
(master, I guess) drive is written and it will take a while. No percentage on the progress
bar was indicated after about 10 minutes. So the program just stopped and no damage
was done to my master. I just quit the routine.


Perhaps it is the program. It runs from cdr and I reset my BIOS routine to load
cdr first. The program was loaded properly far as iI know.


However no error message was given that there was a problem.


Can you direct me to another program or routine that might work better or
help with g4l?

[Dog-One]

A few things to note. Your slave drive is 1/3 the size of your master, so doing a direct copy from master to slave won't work. If there is more than 5GBs of stuff on master, then something has to go.

There are so many ways to copy from one disk to another with Linux, I don't know where to start.

My personal favorite is to get the source and destination filesystems mounted, then use rsync -qax <source mount point> <destination mount point>.

So let me show you how I would do a disk to disk copy. First, lets say that my slave disk can be erased and it's known to Linux as /dev/hdb. Now lets say my master that I want to copy has everything I want in a partition known to Linux as /dev/hda3. I'm going to ignore volume labels because, frankly they are useful, but sometimes they clash and they add a level of abstraction I want to avoid for this example. I want to mount my master and my slave stuff so I can do the copy. My slave is expendible, so I'll partition it and format it.

Using fdisk /dev/hdb I'll destroy all the partitions and recreate one partition, write the new partition and exit.

Now I want to format the new partition (/dev/hdb1) as a normal Linux ext3 filesystem. So I do mke2fs -v -c -j -L SLAVE /dev/hdb1

Now we need to make a few changes to /etc/fstab so that we can easily mount our source and destination stuff. So we add the two lines:

/dev/hda3               /mnt/master             ext3    defaults        0 0
/dev/hdb1               /mnt/slave              ext3    defaults        0 0

Next we add the mount points we specified in /etc/fstab by mkdir /mnt/master and mkdir /mnt/slave

Okay, now mount the things up with mount /mnt/master and mount /mnt/slave.

Lastly, do the copy with rsync -qax /mnt/master/ /mnt/slave. This will run a bit and when complete you'll have a copy of your files.

Now if your master is actually "/" (the root directory) and is bootable, you'll have to do a few more things to slave to also make it bootable. For one, you'll have to specify with fdisk /dev/hdb that you want the the first partition to be active. You'll also need to use the Grub installer to write the MBR (master boot record) to /dev/hdb.

And that should do it. On a side note here, if your master disk has fragmented files, your slave disk will not (unlike doing a true disk image)

[loninappleton]

Originally Posted by Dog-One

A few things to note. Your slave drive is 1/3 the size of your master, so doing a direct copy from master to slave won't work. If there is more than 5GBs of stuff on master, then something has to go.

There are so many ways to copy from one disk to another with Linux, I don't know where to start.

My personal favorite is to get the source and destination filesystems mounted, then use rsync -qax <source mount point> <destination mount point>.

So let me show you how I would do a disk to disk copy. First, lets say that my slave disk can be erased and it's known to Linux as /dev/hdb. Now lets say my master that I want to copy has everything I want in a partition known to Linux as /dev/hda3. I'm going to ignore volume labels because, frankly they are useful, but sometimes they clash and they add a level of abstraction I want to avoid for this example. I want to mount my master and my slave stuff so I can do the copy. My slave is expendible, so I'll partition it and format it.

Using fdisk /dev/hdb I'll destroy all the partitions and recreate one partition, write the new partition and exit.

Now I want to format the new partition (/dev/hdb1) as a normal Linux ext3 filesystem. So I do mke2fs -v -c -j -L SLAVE /dev/hdb1

Now we need to make a few changes to /etc/fstab so that we can easily mount our source and destination stuff. So we add the two lines:

/dev/hda3               /mnt/master             ext3    defaults        0 0
/dev/hdb1               /mnt/slave              ext3    defaults        0 0

Next we add the mount points we specified in /etc/fstab by mkdir /mnt/master and mkdir /mnt/slave

Okay, now mount the things up with mount /mnt/master and mount /mnt/slave.

Lastly, do the copy with rsync -qax /mnt/master/ /mnt/slave. This will run a bit and when complete you'll have a copy of your files.

Now if your master is actually "/" (the root directory) and is bootable, you'll have to do a few more things to slave to also make it bootable. For one, you'll have to specify with fdisk /dev/hdb that you want the the first partition to be active. You'll also need to use the Grub installer to write the MBR (master boot record) to /dev/hdb.

And that should do it. On a side note here, if your master disk has fragmented files, your slave disk will not (unlike doing a true disk image)

Jeez.


Sounds to me like a lot of places to screw up and do
a lot of damage. What's the quick way to do the
equivalent of a 'size' command for both drives?

I am mostly working without a net on this.
The master has to have enough space to make the
mirror file to copy. I have another 15G around here
in another drive tray but it's an old Windows one.

Is there any way to to say to the master: "wipe the
target drive and reformat/mbr etc. etc."?
And could this be done from the cd drive or someplace
out of the way of harm of my master with all the
original work on it?

I hadn't much idea of the size of a full Fedora Core2
install so I used the smallest, oldest drive I had as
a test install. It all went in to I kept it for a slave.


Is that your picture?

[loninappleton]

Dog,

I had a problem.

After screwing up the courage to wipe a drive and use your command instructions, I found that the drive was ignored!

After running the commands and not seeing anything going on
with the df command for dev/hdb after running fdisk,

I left what I thought was a wiped drive in my setup and it just booted Windows like it always did.


So this instruction strings above did not take.


I used [root] throught the whole deal.


lon@athenet.net

[Dog-One]

A couple of notes here:

After you partition the new drive, do a fdisk -l to verify the partitions.

Then after formatting the slave drive and mounting it, do a df to be sure everything is mounted and ready prior to doing the copy.

When you do the copy, you can use rsync -vax <source> <destination> to verbosely monitor the file transfer.

[loninappleton]

Well that was my question: I never got as far as fdisk... which
I read elsewhere should be cfdisk instead.


I can wipe the drive with HD setup disk, but I don't think
that's what you meant.


So right now that backup 15g still has all the Windows
stuff on it just like no commands were executed.


Is there some sort of permission required to do this?
Or maybe a secret password?


Thanks for answering in any case, I just haven't seen any results here so I didn't get to any disk dump.

[sej7278]

Acronis True Image 8

It will do disk-to-disk (including MBR, Grub etc) and shrink/expand the partitions as necessary.

I've used it with FC2 and RH9. Well worth the $50

[loninappleton]

Originally Posted by Dog-One

A few things to note. Your slave drive is 1/3 the size of your master, so doing a direct copy from master to slave won't work. If there is more than 5GBs of stuff on master, then something has to go.

There are so many ways to copy from one disk to another with Linux, I don't know where to start.

My personal favorite is to get the source and destination filesystems mounted, then use rsync -qax <source mount point> <destination mount point>.

So let me show you how I would do a disk to disk copy. First, lets say that my slave disk can be erased and it's known to Linux as /dev/hdb. Now lets say my master that I want to copy has everything I want in a partition known to Linux as /dev/hda3. I'm going to ignore volume labels because, frankly they are useful, but sometimes they clash and they add a level of abstraction I want to avoid for this example. I want to mount my master and my slave stuff so I can do the copy. My slave is expendible, so I'll partition it and format it.

Using fdisk /dev/hdb I'll destroy all the partitions and recreate one partition, write the new partition and exit.

Now I want to format the new partition (/dev/hdb1) as a normal Linux ext3 filesystem. So I do mke2fs -v -c -j -L SLAVE /dev/hdb1

Now we need to make a few changes to /etc/fstab so that we can easily mount our source and destination stuff. So we add the two lines:

/dev/hda3               /mnt/master             ext3    defaults        0 0
/dev/hdb1               /mnt/slave              ext3    defaults        0 0

Next we add the mount points we specified in /etc/fstab by mkdir /mnt/master and mkdir /mnt/slave

Okay, now mount the things up with mount /mnt/master and mount /mnt/slave.

Lastly, do the copy with rsync -qax /mnt/master/ /mnt/slave. This will run a bit and when complete you'll have a copy of your files.

Now if your master is actually "/" (the root directory) and is bootable, you'll have to do a few more things to slave to also make it bootable. For one, you'll have to specify with fdisk /dev/hdb that you want the the first partition to be active. You'll also need to use the Grub installer to write the MBR (master boot record) to /dev/hdb.

And that should do it. On a side note here, if your master disk has fragmented files, your slave disk will not (unlike doing a true disk image)

I am back and still trying to get this backup done. Here's the news. I got drive not found errors or
whatever when I rebooted using various of the phrases you have up there in fstab. So that file now looks like this:

(I'm still coming tot the part about proc and partitions)


LABEL=/ / ext3 defaults 1 1
LABEL=/boot /boot ext3 defaults 1 2
none /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
none /sys sysfs defaults 0 0
/dev/hda3 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom udf,iso9660 noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,owner,kudzu 0 0
/dev/hda3 /mnt/hda ext3 defaults 0 0
/dev/hdb1 /mnt/hdb ext3 defaults 0 0


ok.

Now the proc/particition command gives these as the avaialble options to mount... i guess:



[root@athenet root]# cat /proc/partitions
major minor #blocks name

3 0 15021720 hda
3 1 100768 hda1
3 2 14132160 hda2
3 3 786240 hda3
3 64 14648760 hdb
3 65 14643216 hdb1
[root@athenet root]#


That's where I am now. The cat /proc/partitions command I got from a book.


lon@athenet.net