[...]
KMH> The best way to do that that I've found so far is to set up
KMH> a box with two removable hard drive racks, install and
KMH> _configure_ everything on one drive, then use `cfdisk',
KMH> `mkswap', and `mke2fs' to partition and format the second
KMH> drive.
[...]
I do a possibly non-kosher thing similar to the above. I tar
everything up once it is set up and stick the tar file[s] into a
SCSI drive. I have a box that boots from this SCSI drive and has
IDE drawers and a kernel with IDE support built as modules. I then
hot-swap IDE drives, sfdisk, mke2fs, mount and un-tar without bringing
down the machine. Insmoding the ide modules after switching the
drives on and rmmoding before removing them seems to work fine.
Never lost a drive yet, but the largest drives I worked with under
this scheme were 4.3G. With the newer/larger drives, you'd probably
need to make sure LILO and the BIOS agree on a geometry for the drive
to be actually bootable (dunno the incantation for that yet!).
cheers,
BM
