I have spent the better part of this rainy afternoon searching this and other forums about system backup. A lot of good info however, I have not found the solution I need. In a nutshell...

Prior to FC3 (I think is where the issue started) I would take an image of the primary drive in the system using Norton Ghost 2003 to a file on the secondary (data only) drive. Might even copy the backup to another machine or CD/DVD. If (when ;-) I hosed up something I could simply use Ghost to restore the primary drive. Norton Ghost will not handle the Logical Volume Groups of FC3(?) and later.

I tried Ghost for Linux (g4l) on FC3 and was able to backup partitions although I never tried to restore them. I setup a machine with FC6 and a stack of old hard drives so I can finally figure this out. And now, g4l v0.21 (latest) will not handle the LVG created by FC6. Nor will partimage.

/dev/hda1 system = "Linux" - image no problem
/dev/hda2 system = "Linux LVM" - "not supported"

I tried to install FC (several versions) without the volume group business - even installed FC2 then "upgraded" to FC5 - looks like I get the volume group feature period.

I have 2 x 320GB Barracudas in my FC5 server. Those I can backup to (a lot of) DVDs - samba to the DVD burner in a Windoze box. It is most frustrating not to be able to backup a few hundred meg from the OS drive.

Oh, I also did a test dd if=/hda of=/hdb on my test machine. It copied from the 20GB drive to a 30GB drive however when I switched the drive the copy would not boot - grub hung - no message.

If anyone has a solution or approach to this it would be greatly appreciated.

TIA

Regards,

Ken

This might help http://tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/

A great resource. Thank you! However, it is a little over my head. I am looking for a simple, brute force method to backup and be able to restore my operating system drive. I do not have a need for all the neat things that LVMs can do. However, it looks like I am stuck with them if I use Fedora.

Regards,

Ken

If you do not want lvm at install time you have to select manual partitionning, fc5 was doing the samething.

Thanks! That may be just what I am looking for. I always choose to review/change the partitioning however I do not recall seeing an option not to LVM. Let me try a new install and do the partitioning totally by hand.

Regards,

Ken

You have to use the "Create custom layout".

Here's a screenshot I just took for you, doing an vmware FC6 installation.

http://img398.imageshack.us/img398/6381/captureft6.png

Thanks again glussier. I will give that a try.

Ken