can i make a copy of a disk?
 

I'm running fedora 14 - want to upgrade to fedora 16 - would feelbetter if i had a bootable copy of my disk

Back in the day - on different op systems - typically there were 2 ways to copy a disk - physical and logical. Physical - sector by sector - result bootable and identical to original. Logical - go through file sytem and consolidate various segments of each file - at end change the boot info in the bootstrap to point to the op sys.

I dont seem to find either on Fedora 14 with the virtual drive file system.

I'm getting old and forgetful - and I was never really expert on Unix and its children. is there some easy way for me to make a copy of my drive before I upgrade the op sys? can I do it running something i loaded from the drive i wish to copy?

Dick

Try clonezilla, it generates a bit for bit copy, just grab the live cd.

I would suggest using DD command to make a exact copy of disk

good grief kdp

I'd forgotten that i have a cd of clonezilla!?

I'm turning 80 and memory aint what it used to was

Thanks

Dick

do I recall correctly that the new disk must be identical to the old one?

it should be the exact size or may be more than exact will also work. but not less than.

Not smaller.

I used clonezilla to clone my fedora 14 disk, in preparation to doing an upgrade to fedora 16, but have a problem with the upgrade.

I ran preupgrade on the cloned copy (NEW)- setting the original (OLD) aside just in case. Preupgrade fails - boot partition too small (after about 12 hours of on line downloading). A few years ago I started with fedora 12 (maybe) and my boot partition is approx 200MB, while the system now wants more like 500MB. I deleted a few small items from the partition but they were KB items.

So I need to enlarge partition one.

Here is what I'm considering.
using fidsk or some other utility you might suggest and the Fedora logical volume utilities

1 - on NEW delete partition 2 with fdisk or whatever
2 - on New expand partition 1 - fdisk/whatever
3 - on New create a new partition 2 with specs similar to the old partition 2, occupying the rest of the drive and thus smaller than before -fdisk/whatever.
4 - using Fedora Logical Volume Utilities or whatever , copy from OLD the 2 logical volumes lv_root and lv_swap from OLD.PARTITION_2 to NEW.PARTITION_2 . I know very little about the Logical Volume utilities - I hope there is a way to copy contents of one to another. I believe cp has the disadvantage that it does not handle linked files - am I right/wrong?

Does this make sense?
Better yet - has someone automated this process since I bet I'm not the first guy with this problem

Or more generally - can you suggest a way to upgrade from fedora 14 on a drive with a 200MB boot partition to fedora 16, keeping all the stuff installed that is currently installed and all the files I now have?

Eager to hear your thoughts my friends.

Sorta.
Will it work ?. Nope - too simple, too logical (pardon the pun ... :p)

The increase in /boot was mandated by Fedora a while back - precisely because of pre-upgrade; even if you don't use it. Quite a few of us grumbled at the time, but these days disk is cheap, and so ...
Doco is here - click the Fedora on the left to get different versions.

LVM has it adherents, I not overly infatuated with it. It was designed for (always) increasing space - decreasing wasn't even thought about, and was only added as an after-thought later. Even gparted still won't mess with LVM pvs - and it is generally excellent for this sort of thing.
Even if you could "arrange" the disk layout as you wanted, you couldn't mount both disks as the LVM lvs have the same name, and can't be mounted (even recognised) concurrently.
I have only once got pre-upgrade to work - I have now reverted back to my old plan of clean/new install each time. Then go re-install the stuff I want/need.

syg00

Clearly you understand a lot of stuff tht I wish I had understaood when I originally took the fedora 12 defaults. I assumed I would get a unix style file system and an op system that could be updated.

Yes - I did a clonezilla - I'm working on that copy.

These are 40 GB drives. I could buy a 60 GB (abt $15 delivered on ebay) drive and clone to it while increasing the size of the boot partition? parted (or whatever) to create the two partitions on the bigger drive, DD (or whatever) to populate them?

Does that work?

Dick

Another thread appears to have been opened for the partition issue. No point continuing this.