FC3 full backup and restore options

[P. Thompson]

On Wed, 21 Sep 2005, Mike Pepe wrote:
>
> I don't want to reinstall. Here's what I was thinking of doing- if anyone has 
> any comments or suggetions ("yes that works","I tried that and it didn't 
> work", etc) I'd love to hear them.

I did something similar to this recently

>
> 1: Boot off rescue CD
> 2: change into the /mnt/sysimage directory to get to my root filesystem
> 3: tar the contents onto a physical tape and/or external USB disk

I have good luck with dump, tar might be ok too

> 4: shut down, install hardware RAID card, power up, format RAID arrays
> 5: boot off rescue CD again, partition the RAID disks and create new 
> filesystems, mount new structure under /mnt/sysimage
> 6: untar backup into new directory structure

rm /mnt/sysimage/etc/mtab - screws up grub the most since grub uses it to 
relate your old system to the new configuration
edit fstab
e2label the new disks if your fstab uses labels and you did not create 
them with labels
mkinitrd (make sure any new drivers are in the initrd and the old are out)
check /boot/grub/grub.conf
check /boot/grub/device.map
chroot /mnt/sysimage 
/sbin/grub-install /dev/xxx

> 8: hope machine boots after all this
>
> Comments anyone?