Stupid Linux question with ghosting

[Deja Q]

Hello. I have Acronis TrueImage.

I want to make a backup of my Velociraptor hard drive, which has Vista on it.

After that, I want to take my new Linux setup and deposit it on the Velociraptor.

Will there be any adverse repercussions on the moved Linux system after the final reboot?

(I should probably know better... :blush: )

Thx!

[RoyGBiv]

1. Yes ...

If I'm understanding you here, you want to take an image of your installed Linux system, which is on a different hard drive, and deposit that image on the Velociraptor drive, yes?

The first thing that springs to mind is that on first boot of the newly deposited system /etc/fstab is going to be screwed up. I'm not sure how Fedora does this, but most of the distros I've seen put unique drive identifiers for your hard drives in the fstab file, e.g.

/dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST3250823A_5ND0NAE7-part1 /data1 ext3 defaults 1 2

That's one of my entries for the first partition on one of my drives, mounted at /data1

The fstab file is going to have incorrect information in it when you do the transfer to a different drive. I'm not sure what tools Fedora has for this sort of occurrence.

[Deja Q]

2. Thx much for the info

I found out the hard way it's not going to work. Not with my existing tools, anyway (Acronis).

I'm ultimately rebuilding from scratch; seaparing partitions for /home, et al... Which isn't difficult as I've backed up my virtualbox drive and other data beforehand...

By the time Fedora 11 or SuSE 12 arrives, I'll have a third Velociraptor and make a RAID 5 array; benefit from increased throughput and increased data integrity.

[RoyGBiv]

3. FWIW ...

I never back up the system itself with Linux. I use the dd command to back up the superblock for my boot partition and then I have scripts that run to back up /home and any data partitions I have.

If /root ever eats it, or if I screw up something so badly I need to restore the system, I just reinstall since a new version of whatever I'm using or want to use has come out by then. During that reinstall I just mount /home and those data partitions. If the /home or the data go bad, I just restore them from the backups. Since most of the individual settings for my desktop environment and the tools I use frequently are stored in userspace, pretty much everything is as I left it when this is done.

I also keep backups of xorg.conf and any system-wide config files I have had to tweak manually, e.g. stunnel.conf.

I've had a superblock go bad once, which is why I started backing that up, but I haven't had to use that backup since then.