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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 23/07/12 23:14, Amy Overmyer wrote:<br>
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<div>I had a total hard drive failure on one of my mythtv slave
backends. Fortunately, I have a stack of old ~200 G IDE drives
that were pulled from my master backend some time back whilst
I was upgrading to higher capacity SATA drives. Unfortunately,
it's probably only a matter of time until the replacement
fails as well as these disks are some years old. Obviously to
recover, I had to reinstall mythbuntu, recompile my kernel
(stv0900 driver works better with a patch), and setup my
mythtv stuff. The recompiling of the kernel is probably the
most painful part as this backend is a Geode 1750Mhz CPU. It
is not a fast process on that chip. Since this is a slave, it
doesn't keep recordings or videos on it. </div>
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<div>Anyway, what I was thinking is since I do have a stack of
harddrives, if there is software out there that could backup
my existing linux setup on that slave to another harddrive? I
don't think any of them are identical in size, so imaging
would probably not work. I've read a little about MondoRescue
on this list, but that thread was from 2006! Does anyone do
something similar?</div>
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I used to do what I think it is you want to do. I used to use a
program called BootIt. I installed it on a CD and then the computer
could boot from that CD and copy any partition to a file, or back
again. When the partition was re-created it had to be the same size
as the original partition, but the files could be stored on any size
disc. When I had a failure I copied the most recent copy onto a new
(old) disc and then I had my system running again very quickly. I
had MyDocuments on a separate partition which was backed up
differently. I didn't have back up the root files each day.<br>
<br>
I'd expect that dd or something similar on a linux rescue disc will
do something similar. Also I imagine that your root partition is
very small so you should be able to make a rescue USB stick which
has enough spare room to fit the copy of the root partition.<br>
<br>
Anyway you can copy a partition from a disc onto a another disc
which is at least as large as the first partition.<br>
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