Imaging RHEL WS 4 - integrating into multi boot
 

Hi,

We have a development environment where developer workstations are multi-boot systems booting XP/Vista using a third party boot manager
called System Commander. The developers have a need to use Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 WS. So what I want to do is resize the 2 windows partitions and squeeze in RH on the end. I tried Acronis and I am not really sure how to restore the partitions as there are 3 to restore and I am not sure how the partitions will act when restored.

Also tried ghost, can't restore multiple part. with the version I had
(8). On to Clonezilla. I can backup up and restore to a disk FINE. But I can't seem to get the restoreparts option to work. I am not sure what options to use. Default does not work and only restores the boot. I am sure I am doing something wrong.

Now trying g4l but it is a sector by sector copy. Takes forever and restores the same exact config.

Does anyone have a suggestion on what to use, how to do this? Ultimately I just want to take the linux image (which amounts to 3
partitions of its own) and place it on the last partition. System Commander has the option to hide OS's from each other, which is what I do.

What to do?????????

GNU/Linux needs partitions so you can't wedge 3 partitions into one physical primary or extended partition. What you could do is, on your installation machine, backup the partitions to a removable USB or Firewire disk (or just put the whole disk in an encasing and save time) then on the developers machine use fdisk to create an extended partition or enlarge it respecting the original partition sizes (check source and target disks with with fdisk -l), then use 'dd' to copy the partitions over. Per partition it'll look something like 'dd if=/dev/sdb1 of=/dev/sda5 bs=4096 conv=notrunc,noerror' (see 'man dd'). If you want GUI instead of CLI, boot any Live CD that contains gparted and you'll have a comfortable Partition Magic or Acronis-like interface with which you can just copy the partitions over. After doing that you'll have to boot Centos on the target disk from a Centos installer CD in rescue mode (or a Centos Live CD) to (re-)install GRUB in the partition if you got boot problems and adjust /etc/fstab since the partition names have changed.

//Task-related link-back: [1|2|3].