[K12OSN] OT: Using tar on win98 clients

[Les Mikesell]

On Tue, 2004-10-26 at 14:51, Henry Burroughs wrote:
> I know this is a bit off topic, but I'm doing the ever necessary task
> of ghosting.  I would be using partimage (and I was), except some of
> the hard disks are different sizes (and partimage doesn't support
> shrinking).  I'm using a knoppix cd  (3.4 i think).
> 
> I'm trying tar (trying to keep it simple), and when I restore the
> image onto a fresh drive, it still won't boot properly (I'm even using
> msdos fdisk /mbr to reset the MBR).  So the MBR is in place, it just
> doesn't want to load from there.  Any suggestions or hints?  THanks.
> 
> Basically, my requirements are a imaging program (or tar) that handles
> restoring to smaller drives (of course, big enough for the actual
> data).
> 
> I've spent waaaay too much time trying to get this monster to work.

You've probably done this part already:
 fdisk partitions with enough space
 mke2fs -j  (each partition except swap)
 mkswap  (the swap partion)
 mount them somewhere
 tar -xp  to put the contents in place

Now, you have 2 things to fix.  One is that the fstab you copied
probably says to mount labels instead of partition names, the
other is that you don't have a boot loader installed in the MBR
on the drive.  If you know you are going this route, edit the
/etc/fstab file before making the tar copy and change it to
have partition names instead of labels so it will be right on
the clone.  Alternatively you can run e2label from the knoppix
cd to add the labels to the partitions, or edit fstab on the
copy while running from knoppix.

If you are cloning a k12ltsp install, redhat, or fedora, boot
the install CD and at the boot prompt enter 'Linux rescue'.  If
the /etc/fstab file matches your partition layout by now, it
will offer to mount the partitions under /mnt/sysinstall and show
the command to chroot there.  Do it, then
grub-install
to make the new system bootable, then
exit (twice) to unmount the drives cleanly and reboot.

---
  Les Mikesell
   les at futuresource.com