Installation Questions

[Austin Godber]

If you have a linux machine with diskspace on a 100Mbps network with the 
machine in question then toss a knoppix CD in and follow this procedure:

1.) start samba on machine with space for image
2.) mount samba share from knoppix machine
3.) run partimage on the knoppix machine
     a.) backup the win2k partition to the samba partition
         (I have done a partition with about 6GB in 15 min)

Now you have your win2k image on your samba server ready to restor with 
partimage just in case of disaster.  Oh you may want to back up your MBR 
to a file on the samba server too:

         dd if=/dev/hda of=/samba-path/hda-img.mbr bs=512 count=1

This is a great trick.  In particular if you want to reproduce your 
image to many machines (there are a few extra steps if this is the 
case).  But it is handy to have images of partitions laying around just 
in case.

I am not sure how big of a partition you would want to back up though. 
Well, its not the partition size of course, just the size of the files 
in the partition.

Also, a side note.  I have had problems with this in the sense that 
partimage has died in the backup phase saying that the filesize limit 
has been exceeded.  But my target system has no such limit (well, it 
does but its far beyond what I tried) my only guess was that samba 
enforces some sort of filesize limit (2GB-ish).  So I just imaged to 
another disk and scp'd the image to my server.  But don't worry 
partimage has a nice file splitting feature.  Oh one last caveat, 
partimage will warn you about NTFS problems.  I didn't experience any, 
and I imaged about 12 machines.

Austin

PS - Knoppix is wonderful.  Saved me the trouble of using ghost.  Well, 
actually saved me the trouble of buying ghost.


Mark Phillips wrote:
> I need to build a dual boot system - Linux and Win 2000. The machine 
> already has Win 2000 installed, and the original installation disks are 
> MIA, so I cannot reinstall Win 2000 if I make a mistake. My questions:
> 
> 1. Any suggestions on how to safeguard the Win2000 on this machine since I 
> cannot reinstall it if I break it?
> 2. Which distro would you recommend - RedHat 8.0 or Mandrake 9.0? Any views 
> on stability since both are relatively new?
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> Mark Phillips
> Phillips Marketing, Inc.
> mark@phillipsmarketing.biz
> 480 945-0798
> 480 945-9197 fax
> 
> No trees were destroyed in the sending of this contaminant free message,
> however, a significant number of electrons may have been inconvenienced.
> 
> 
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