I'm looking to replace a 2gig drive with an 8gig drive i dug up. My problem is that both my IDE chains are full. Here is my fstab:

/dev/hdc1 / ext3 defaults 1 1
none /dev/pts devpts mode=0620 0 0
none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
/dev/hdd1 /home ext3 defaults 1 2
/mnt/cdrom /mnt/cdrom supermount dev=/dev/hdb,fs=iso9660,ro,--,iocharset=iso8859-1 0 0
/mnt/floppy /mnt/floppy supermount dev=/dev/fd0,fs=vfat,--,iocharset=iso8859-1,sync,codepage=850 0 0
/dev/hda1 /mnt/windows vfat iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/hdc5 swap swap defaults 0 0


I tried pulling the 2gig out and putting it into another machine with the 8gig and then used Ghost to dup the drives. Ghost seemed to work ok but when i put the 8gig into my linux box, it did not like it at all. I'm sure there is a simple solution to this but I think I'm too green to see it.

Thanks in advance.

Is the drive you're replacing the drive you boot with?

Norton Ghost invariably screws up the MBR when cloning dual-boot systems.

You have to boot with a rescue floppy and rewrite LILO to the MBR.

Just run /sbin/lilo

If you're using GRUB, switch to LILO. It will save you headaches when Ghosting systems.

HTH

Poor mans Ghost:

# dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdd
(Just an example, replace with your actual drive names you want to copy)

Also, no need to switch from GRUB to LILO.. Just get GRUB to re-write the boot sector

# /sbin/grub-install /dev/hda

wdingus,

I agree with you on both counts in taz's situation.

My recommendations were more general to any Ghost user who clones Linux systems. I just want to clarify my comments for anyone else interested in this thread. I've posted on this topic before, but no one replied so I had to do a lot of reading on Norton's web site and a lot of trial and error.

My comment about favoring LILO was based on the particular way in which I use Ghost (and on Norton's recommendations). Using LILO saves time and is more efficient in my situation.

I have to update single and dual boot images in computer labs with dozens of PCs every two weeks. Ghost sure is nice for that....except that it screws up the MBR. Norton's stance is that they:

a) Don't support ghosting dual-boot systems via multicast (which is what I do)

and

b) Advise against the use of GRUB

To quote them (pulled straight from their web site):

"Note that Symantec does not provide support for using Ghost with a Linux version that uses the GRUB boot loader. The following information is provided as a convenience only. For more information on Ghost support, see the document Ghost compatibility with Linux."

Their web site has unsupported, but documented workarounds for problems with both LILO and GRUB, though, and one option is to do what you suggest above.

For people who use Ghost like I do (multicasting rooms of PCs at a time), the main reason to use LILO is that it Ghosts correctly almost every time (except in dual boot systems). GRUB essentially never Ghosts correctly.

Choosing GRUB over LILO for me would mean taking the time to fix GRUB on all those PCs. That is exactly what you don't want to have to do if you're using Ghost to multicast in the first place.

All that being said, IS there a way to restore GRUB?

I can boot my RH9 distro with a boot floppy made during install, but not from my Ghosted HD (using Norton Ghost 2003.)

The first instructions I found were dependent on a working copy of "stage1" and "stage2." I don't understand the Linux boot process well enough to know why these files exist on my non-booting HD, but not on my boot disk, and further, if the boot disk is accessing "stage1" and "stage2" on my HD, which it appears to be doing since my system boots as long as I use the floppy disk, why does the system not find these files if I try to boot from the HD? System stops after all hardware initialization, with the word GRUB being the last thing to appear on my command line. The system doesn't start into the graphical startup at all.
How does one restore the entire boot process without re-installing the entire system? Anyone know? If this were Win9x, I'd be doing a simple "sys C:" command, and all would be well, isn't there any sort of equivalent under Linux to recreate the boot from scratch?

If you made a boot diskette, boot from it.. Run "grub-install"

Otherwise, boot your install CD, have it access the existing install and mount and chroot to it and in a shell run "grub-install".

Thanks for your help wdingus. I had the same problems with grub -install as I did with grub -setup. Couldn't seem to get the system to look at the correct partition I think. I got it working, but it wasn't exactly as my instructions told me. For instance, when I do find /boot/grub/stage1 it always said file not found. I got the correct response using find /grub/stage1 instead. However, that just tells me where grub is installed, right? I already knew that was (hd0,2). I then was supposed to run root (hd0,2) and grub -setup from there. Still I had problems, and I'm not entirely sure what made the difference in the end, just hacked my way through
I think what finally made the difference for me is I used grub -setup and included the "force LBA mode" switch. At that point I stopped getting all but one of the errors indicating I wasn't getting it. grub setup STILL returned an error about /boot/grub/stage1 not found, then it would continue on and say /grub/stage1 found, then /stage1 found, /stage2 found, etc. When it was done, my system could finally boot from the HD again.

Just a quick concurrence on the Ghost and LILO...I had similar problems ghosting Dell Poweredges and found that GRUB causes problems. Part of the problems were solved by switching back to LILO as the boot loader, but the remainder of the problems were solved by switching to Ghost Enterprise version 7.5, which then allowed me to multicast the images out to the systems. I had to do some networking and hostname configuration by hand at first, but all systems booted, and a quick shell script executed on boot did away with the networking issues.

I have a question I would like to add here. I am a local college student attending NSTCC. I see some posts from Kingsport, TN users so maybe they can answer this question. We are cloning systems accross the network labs, the OS being Redhat 9. I want to know a way to make it ask for network installation info on firstboot. Something similar in nature as the firstboot daemon would be great. Anyone have any suggestions? I am sure a script could be written to accomplish this, but I am trying to make it as easy on myself as possible.

yes, there are scripts that will prompt a sysidconfig on first boot, but i would have to dig them up...i would suggest www.linux.org or if i can find them, i will post them here.

Also, while ghosting over a network, you need to make sure that the hardware is the same, or that you have created a Ghost Boot Disk specifically for each machine...then the network ghost will work...also make sure that your network routers/switches are configured for multicast sessions

We are actually using Powerquest Deploy center. It supposedly supports Redhat 9, but no matter how we do the image the boot loader is always misconfigured. It seems that the partions get moved no matter what we try, even doing exact duplicates. That may be easily fixed by having an image of the ERD on the Powerquest server, restart all of the systems with PXE boot, load the image of the ERD and then replair the grub. Ghost 2003 works without a hitch, but we prefer to use the Powerquest for mass deployment.

I guess we actually have two problems, this grub problem and then the problem of doing a sysidconfig. With Sun Solaris, all you do is load the OS, then sun sys-unconfig, create the image on the Powerquest server, and you are rteady to go. When you deploy the images and reboot them systems imaged, they are ready for information to be entered. Do you think I could do this with Redhat? I was going to just try it, but I thought I would get some suggestions from here before I jump the gun. Thanks for the info, and if you find those scripts I will try those out for sure.

We used powerquest products before, but went to Ghost Enterprise, since it did multicast of a single image to multiple recievers. I would suggest changing your boot loader from grub to lilo for cloning, as grub seems to have some issues with even cloning one to one. With Solaris, you could have input a custom jumpstart script that, using a bootparams file, and the /etc/ethers file, would have identified each system with the correct ip and host name. I am not sure on linux if that is possible with kickstart, but that would be a place to start.

If you are going to use the powerquest product that i would strongly suggest using lilo...i will keep looking for the scripts for you

Have you looked into Red Hat's kickstart?

I used it six months ago to dup a PowerEdge 2650 - all I needed was a kickstart floppy and the Red Hat CD set.

Mind you, I am an up2date subscriber so patching is trivial for me... the Ghost method (or Mondo for that matter) gets you to the current patchlevels right away. Kickstart won't do that unless you update the distro CDs.

Haven't actually used kickstart for that, but I expect that it will work the same fashion as jumpstart. I would expect that you could setup kickstart to also use the same type of files to do sysidconfig during load, as jumpstart does...I would suggest linux.org to find the how-to on network kickstart.

only just found this post and its a goodee.

for others finding it like me, if replacing drives, please check your jumper positions for the new drive are correct and

me thinking out aloud, often wrong, be aware that your may have compiled your kernel with IDE stuff and your new drive is scsi etc. so if your new drive boots up do a recompile if you are into that sort of thing