trentfox

[Log in to get rid of this advertisement]

I have been testing several distros on my Apple PowerBook G4, and my hard drive is a mess as a result (17 partitions on an 80gb drive!). I have one more to test and then I want to completely reformat the drive, reinstall MacOSX (I know how to do that) and afterwards, reinstall the two Linux distros that I think work best on this hardware. I presently have Debian Etch and openSUSE 11 installed, and both are candidates for a final installation. In both cases, I've already done some work to get particular apps installed and configured, and I don't want to have to reinvent the wheel. My thinking is to do clone those installations and then put one or both back on a reformatted disk. How do I do that? Or if there is a better way to accomplish what I want (restoring files and settings I added from the base installations, I'm all ears.

johnson_steve

well I usualy tar up the /etc and /home and do a fresh install. there are ways to do what you want but sometimes it causes trouble. all the settings are either in /etc or in the users' home directories. so if you replace those from your old install (after you reinstall the applications you want) everything should be configured (even you desktop background and Internet bookmarks and such.)

ehawk

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...oning_software

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_%28Unix%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PartImage

trentfox

Thanks, both of you. I don't have large installations to back up. I may try both cloning and backing up specific folders. Also, I have a Mac-on-Linux virtual disk (disk image) in my home folder that would be useful to back up and restore later. I can now see some advantages to reinstalling from scratch and adding things that were a pain to obtain. One was the wireless Broadcom installation using BCM43xxcutter to extract the driver from my PowerBook. Would that be captured in the /etc folder?

johnson_steve

I don't remember if it's in /etc (most likely it is.) my g4 iBook died a horible long dragged out death last fall (involving a rabitt 2 car batteries and a woodworking clamp.) I don't remember fwcutter being that hard to use and everything is always easier the second time around. I've backed up a partition with dd then restored it to another partition: unless it's exactly the same size your going to have problems. even if you are able to back up and restore your partitions perfectly your fstab will have to be edited by hand to reflect the new partitioning scheem which will be extra complicated since a mac needs to have several 'padding' partitions that remain unused so that the used partitions start in the right place. also you need to use a special partitioning tool for mac partition tables. trust me I did everything manualy my iBook ran gentoo ppc. it's going to be much less of a headache to back up a few important directories and then do a fresh install especialy if your reinstalling OSX anyways.