Re: Can linux be ghosted

From: peter pilsl (pilsl_usenet_at_goldfisch.at)
Date: 12/06/03 

Date: Sat, 6 Dec 2003 18:17:02 +0100

Steve wrote:

>
> Is it possible to ghost a linux installation?
>

Let me go a bit more into the details than the other fellows :)

We use norton ghost for years to backup and rollout windows-installations.
The big advantage of ghost is that it is very simple to use:
boot from a cd containing ghost and backup
boot from a cd again and restore and reset the computer and on you go,
cause ghost restore all the bootsectors on its own.

Things are not that simple on linux, but as always: things are better on
linux ;)

if you want a complete image of your current installation, you can just
backup the whole harddisk byte for byte. This will end up in a very big
image (cause even parts of the harddisk not actually used are backuped) but
if you restore the image, your machine is ready to boot again.

The more common way is, to backup only the files of your installation and
restoring the backup involve the following steps:
i) boot from a rescue-system (knoppix-cd is recommended)
ii) call fdisk to prepare your new disk and then format the new partitions
iii) restore the files from backup
iv) chroot to the new system and run lilo to reinstall the boot-stuff

This is done very easily if you got used to it and brings you many
advantages, cause you can change things in each step. You can completely
change the partitioning and the mount-points, you can change the used the
filesystems and you can of course add/remove/change all kind of
raid-systems.

So this is the method of choice for ghosting linux-installations:
i) boot a rescue-system (or make you running system read-only, so files on
disk are not changed while backuping)
ii) use tar for backup

restoring is described above then.

good luck,
peter 

-- 
peter pilsl
pilsl_usenet@goldfisch.at
http://www.goldfisch.at

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