Need to partion a new system

rocs78 · 10-21-2004, 07:29 PM

I am trying to ghost a current version of Fedora that I am running. I have managed to create the ghost images of each partition on the master system, however my problem comes in when I am trying to put the ghost images on the new system. I need to have the new systems HDD partitioned with the Ext2 and Ext3 partitions etc. Is there anyway I can do this without running the Fedora Install Cd's??? Basically I want to be able to send these Cd's and perhaps a floppy disk to a user and have them rebuilt of build a new PC from the ghost images????

Can Linux partition the drive from a bootup disk similar to the FDISK used by DOS.... If so what problem would I use and is it user friendly???? Thank you all for any help you can provide on this matter

Mara · 10-22-2004, 04:20 PM

You can do it. Simply by copying or by using 'dd' program. dd allows (among other things) to build disks/partitions/floppy images. Syntax looks this way
dd if=/dev/hda of=myimage.img
It creates an image of /dev/hda1 (first partition on your first disk) to myimage.img file. Then you can compress it and send/move to another machine. When writing it back switch 'if' and 'of' parameters (of course, use the right partition and the right file name). Running 'man dd' will show you many more possible options.

The partitioning program you can use from most installation cds (in rescue mode but also using standard installation mode) is ...fdisk

It's text mode, so may b hard first time you try it. Has descriptions of all the options so if you read them carefully before using it shouldn't be that hard. You may also other tools available like parted (used to change partition sizes etc).

rocs78 · 10-22-2004, 06:39 PM

Thanks for your help Mara, I found the Fdisk system and gave it a try, however it required manual intervention to partition the drive. (selecting partitions one at a time). I have also come across SFDISK which allows us to use a script file to set the partition size and type. We are going to try this next week but I think we will also look at the DD command you mentioned and see if that will be easier for us!!!

Thanks for your help