I'm looking for a utility that will allow me to image my SuSE 9.0 reiserfs hard disk. I've tried ghost v7.0 using the native disk imaging and sector-to-sector imaging and this is what I get when I boot off the newly imaged disk:

L99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999
9999999999999999999999999999999999999999
9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999
9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999
999999999999999999999999999999999999999999

This occurs and just hangs. I'm thinking that somehow the bootloader isn't being imaged correctly, but I'm not really sure. I'm running SuSE 9.0 with the Lilo bootloader. All my partitions are on the same hard drive and all formated with reiserfs, except the swap. thanks for any advice/direction in this matter.

marshall

I was not aware that ghost supported reiserfs...that's cool if it does. I really like ghost on the windows side but I have been looking for a suitable open-source replacement. I have had luck with partimage and g4l (ghost for linux). The problems with these two are the following.

Partimage is good for making network image file backups of hds but is not suitable to clone disk to disk. One other problem is that you have to recreate the partitions on a drive before cloning the partitions back to the new drive.

g4l - is ok for both but it does a full bit by bit clone of the drive when going disk to disk - no matter how much data is on the drive. This makes disk imaging extremely slow in comparison to ghost. You also have to resize the partition to fill the disk after cloning using a program like parted.

Neither of these will let you clone to a smaller disk. Useful from a technician's standpoint when cloning large drives without the hd being full.

the problems I have heard about ghost cloning using ext2 or 3 partitions is that it messes up the mbr. Your problem may be able to be fixed by using a boot disk to start your machine, checking the /etc/lilo.conf file for errors and then rerunning lilo to rewrite the mbr.

I really wish there was a true replacement for ghost in the open-source world.

Actually, I have found that partimage works very nicely for "cloning" a hard drive. I use the sfdisk utility to backup and restore the partition table which includes the mbr and the layout of partitions.

Here's my notes on that....

If you are going to clone an NTFS partition, you may want to run defrag and scandisk first.

Get a cd bootable version of linux like system rescue at http://www.sysresccd.org and bootup with that cd.

Mount the partition where the images are going to be saved to.
mount /dev/hdb1 /mnt/images/backup -t ext3

Run partimage to make the images and save it to the backup directory which was created in the previous step.

In this example, I have a dual boot system so I backed up both operating systems with partimage.

Save the ENTIRE PARTITION TABLE to a file using sfdisk.
sfdisk –d /dev/hda > /mnt/images/backup/partfile

If you have an Extended partition, sfdisk may give you an error when you try to restore. In this case, it's better to use dd to backup and restore the partition table.
dd if=/dev/hda of=/mnt/images/backup/mbrfile bs=512 count=1

The clone script will restore that partition table and MBR from files to the new hard drive using the commands:
sfdisk /dev/hda < /mnt/images/backup/partfile
or
dd if=/mnt/images/backup/mbrfile of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1

After you have saved the images and the partition table, install the new hard drive, make sure that bios sees it as the /dev/hda ( Primary Master ) so you don’t accidently zap your backup images which are saved on the /dev/hdb ( Primary Slave ) .

Bootup with the rescue cd and run the clone script to restore the images to your new hard drive.

thanks a lot for all of this guys. I'm going to check out ghost for linux 1st and then will try the systemrcd method.

Your instructions and script would make things a lot easier. In fact I may try that tomorrow. However, that is still too much work for what I want in cloning one drive to another. It takes one more step than I want in the process. I want one that lets me set the source drive, target drive, and then lets me define how i want the partitions resized on the new drive. That is what I am looking for in a drive clone app for where I work. I guess I have to keep using ghost for the time being.

I need this simple in terms of a gui to let the other technicians not well versed in linux to use it.

is there any software similiar to ghost for linux which can create the image while the server is running? My main concern is that in order to backup an entire disk I have to reboot into the ghost for linux disk and then create the image. I'd like to be able to do this while the server is running in it's OS.

you could try rsync for that. I am not sure if it will create images though

so will this rsync copy one disk to another on the fly? I'm also curious if this rsync will exactly replicate my one SCSI disk to another in my system. Meaning that if rsync has run and the primary disk fails I can shutdown, and bootup off the other disk into the OS.

Not sure if it matter but The primary SCSI disk(sda) is partitioned like this:

sda1: /boot
sda2: swap
sda3: /

thanks
marshall

I haven't tried it yet but this looks like an extremely promising application.

http://www.mondorescue.org/

I have a powerbook running mac OSX.3 that I use and there is a program for it called Carbon Copy Cloner. This program uses rsync to copy the entire to another hd while the machine is running. You can then boot off the other drive.

I suppose you could use rsync to sync the files to another disk of around the same size and create the same partitions etc. on it. then you could use this other disk to boot off of if your other drive ever failed.

I guess I need help with the rsync command and doing the exact mirror.

from the looks of it I think I could do a:

rsync -av / /mnt/sdb3/

Wouldn't this make an exact mirror of my entire hard drive (sda) on sdb (supposing that I had mounted sdb3 on /mnt/sdb3, and sdb1 on /mnt/sdb3/boot?) Somehow I feel that somethings missing or that this won't work correctly.

My setup is:

sda1: /boot
sda2: swap
sda3: /

what do you guys think?

This is from the rsync examples page.

backup to a spare disk

I do local backups on several of my machines using rsync. I have an
extra disk installed that can hold all the contents of the main
disk. I then have a nightly cron job that backs up the main disk to
the backup. This is the script I use on one of those machines.

#!/bin/sh

export PATH=/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin

LIST="rootfs usr data data2"

for d in $LIST; do
mount /backup/$d
rsync -ax --exclude fstab --delete /$d/ /backup/$d/
umount /backup/$d
done

DAY=`date "+%A"`

rsync -a --delete /usr/local/apache /data2/backups/$DAY
rsync -a --delete /data/solid /data2/backups/$DAY



The first part does the backup on the spare disk. The second part
backs up the critical parts to daily directories. I also backup the
critical parts using a rsync over ssh to a remote machine.

so with this part here I'm guessing the primary disk is backing up to the spare disk:

#!/bin/sh

export PATH=/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin

LIST="rootfs usr data data2"

for d in $LIST; do
mount /backup/$d
rsync -ax --exclude fstab --delete /$d/ /backup/$d/
umount /backup/$d
done

I'm curious if there is an fstab entry for /backup/$d, due to not seeing a device being mounted here. I also need a little help understanding this. What is "$d". is this the "/" of his main drive? and I'm assuming that his other drive is mounted on "/backup/$d/". So this is mounting that backup drive, excluding any files named "fstab", deleting files that don't exist on the primary drive (how do you delete files that aren't there?), and then syncing the source drive mounted on "/$d/" with the backup drive mounted on "/backup/$d/".

What do you think? Can you guys help me understand this script better?

Now that I look at the script again I don't believe it's exactly mirroring the drives, any comments?