I want to make a debain hard drive image that will fit onto my 128MB CF card though debain's default install takes up 130MB, I have made a 200MB loopback drive and installed debian using qemu then removed some packadges so that it is down to something like 110MB. Now i would like to put the disk image on my CF card but i can't because the disk is still 200MB big even though it is only using 110MB of it. Is there any way i can rezize the disk wile keeping the partitions and boot secter in tact?

Or can anyone else sujust a distro that is small enougth to fit on a 128MB CF card and isn't a 'live' disto so that it will acutaly remember what IP address i set it when i boot up and stuff like that. Thanks for any help.

"I want to make a debain hard drive image that will fit onto my 128MB CF card though debain's default install takes up 130MB, I have made a 200MB loopback drive and installed debian using qemu then removed some packadges so that it is down to something like 110MB. Now i would like to put the disk image on my CF card but i can't because the disk is still 200MB big even though it is only using 110MB of it. Is there any way i can rezize the disk wile keeping the partitions and boot secter in tact?"

Create a second loopback image the size that you want. Partition it, format the partitions, and then copy the files from the larger image to the smaller.

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Steve Stites

I tryed doing that but i had 2 problems, installing grub on a loopback device didn't want to work (though i'm not sure if i was doing it corectly) and cfdisk (what i was trying to use to partition it with) didn't like the image it just said "FATAL ERROR: Cannot get disk size" Thanks for the quick reply.

I managed to partition it by mouting it and using "cfdisk /dev/loop0" and i have copyed the stuff across, I have prorobly been stupid as i have partitioned it differently, here is the output of "fdisk -l" disk.img is my larger image and cf.img is the smaller image:

#fdisk -l disc.img
You must set cylinders.
You can do this from the extra functions menu.

Disk disc.img: 0 MB, 0 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 0 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
disc.img1 * 1 120 963868+ 83 Linux
disc.img2 121 130 80325 5 Extended
disc.img5 121 130 80293+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
#fdisk -l cf.img
You must set cylinders.
You can do this from the extra functions menu.

Disk cf.img: 0 MB, 0 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 0 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
cf.img1 1 14 112423+ 83 Linux
cf.img2 15 15 8032+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris

Though should that be alright as long as i edit fstab so that it will mount the swap partition from hda2 instead of hda5 if not then what is the Extended partition used for?

As for grub i have tryed it with "qemu -kernel vmlinux -initrd initrd" so that it should just boot the kernel without grub being involved and it gets to pivot_root and says no such file or directory then it thows a kernel pannic i take it that is somehting to do with the partitioning and notthing to do with grub?

"I tryed doing that but i had 2 problems, installing grub on a loopback device didn't want to work (though i'm not sure if i was doing it corectly) and cfdisk (what i was trying to use to partition it with) didn't like the image it just said "FATAL ERROR: Cannot get disk size""

"installing grub on a loopback device didn't want to work"

Use isolinux instead of grub.

"cfdisk (what i was trying to use to partition it with) didn't like the image it just said "FATAL ERROR: Cannot get disk size""

Come to think of it a mounted loopback ISO is a partition. Just format it without partitioning.

"I want to make a debain hard drive image that will fit onto my 128MB CF card"

An alternative way of doing this is to use LifeBoat.

http://users.rcn.com/srstites/LifeBo...home.page.html

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Steve Stites

Unfortinaly i think it needs to be partitioned so i can't just use one drive, though i will try that. The lifeboat linux thing is intresting but not what i am realy looking for, i would prefer to use something like debian as it has all the packadges behind it.

Edit: I have tryed to use images without partitioning and that didn't seem to work.