Stephen, You are probably best off with tar, primarily because it is available on the rescue disk. I'm going to assume that you'll be backup up to tape over the network--this will work just fine. First, to make the backup you should boot your laptop into single-user mode. If you use LILO, at the boot prompt type in "<Linux> single" where "<Linux>" is the tag for Linux. Once you get to the shell (you'll be asked for the root password) you'll need to execute the network startup (and DHCP, if you use that) because single user mode by default doesn't start up the network. If you don't use DHCP this should be as easy as typing "/etc/init.d/network start". Now you're ready to back up. You'll need to have 'rexec' permission on the machine which has the tape backup. Just type
tar -cf <remote-machine>:<remote-tape-device> / If the remote machine where a Solaris box called sunbox this would probably look like: tar -cf sunbox:/dev/rmt/0m / Let this finish and now you've got your backup. On the new laptop use the rescue disk and proceed through the installation up until you've partitioned the disk and initialized the root partition. At this point you need to get the network going. You've got two choices: 1) continue the install process as usual to get through the network setup, needlessly copying the kernel and devices modules or 2) be a brave hacker and go straight to the shell prompt to get things setup by hand. I recommend option 1. Once the network is configured (and up!) then choose the option way at the bottom of the install screen for running the shell. I'm not sure where your newly-initialized root partition will be but you can type 'mount' to print them out. It'll be something weird like '/target/blahblah'. Now you just need to do tar --directory </target/blahblah> -xpf <remote-machine>:<remove-tape-device> Having completed this step you'll need to complete the install step to make the Linux bootable from hard disk. This is because the tar extraction will overwrite the kernel which was initially written on your root partition thereby rendering the lilo boot info foobar. This too you can do by hand from the shell prompt but you have to give lilo some weird params to tell it to do a chroot() and to use a different device for root, etc. etc. Now you're done! Easy, huh? Stephen Beer wrote: > I have installed linux on my laptop (I have used one partition only + a > swap partition). I would like to backup the partition and restore it on > another laptop (of the same model). How can I restore a root partition. > I am use to ufsrestore on Solaris. > > Stephen Beer > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > -- > To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] > with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Jens B. Jorgensen [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
