[NMLUG] drive duplication/backup

[Ed at Heron-ent.com (Ed Heron)]

  What is wrong with tar?

  We all know tar doesn't make a drive bootable.  We also know that if you
tar a partition (ie. tar c /dev/hda), when you untar, it doesn't resize the
partition into the new size.  Tar just isn't designed for that kind of
thing.

  However, I just had occasion to rebuild a Win95 machine because of bad
sectors on the hard drive.  I really didn't want to reinstall everything
from scratch and, even if I had a backup, the data changes constantly, so it
wouldn't have been complete.

  I took a temporary hd, added it to my primary IDE interface and configured
the master/slave relationship.  I booted the machine with my handy Gentoo
v1.4 install disk.  I mounted, then tarred (taking care to preserve the
output by routing standard output {>tar.log} and standard error {2>&1} to a
file), the contents of the FAT32 partition onto the temporary drive.  I then
shutdown the computer.

  I replaced the primary master drive with a good one.  I then booted with
my Win95 boot disk.  (you do have a recovery disk for your Windows computers
don't you?)  I fdisk'd the drive, creating, marking active and formatting
the partition (with system, making bootable).  I shut down the computer.

  I booted with my Gentoo cd again.  This time I un-tarred the backup onto
the new drive.  During the tar process, tar had reported several files with
problems, these were my 'bad' files.  Thankfully, all files were system
files and I was able to pull them from another near duplicate computer.  If
I was duplicating a working FAT32 partition, this wouldn't be necessary.  I
shutdown the computer.

  I removed the temporary drive, corrected the master/slave relationship
(without slave now) and booted the computer.  It is now a working computer.

  Note:  Yes, the boot files were tarred, too, but without making it
bootable first, the drive wouldn't have been bootable.  By using the native
format process to correctly place boot files, the un-tar process overwrote
them in place, preserving their location.  You could just as easily have
installed the new drive instead of the temporary one and run the tar command
as described in a previous post (from new location, tar c /mnt/drv1/* | tar
x).  Also, you could have done the whole tar process without making the new
drive bootable first, then running the sys c: command from your Win95
recovery disk.


  The conclusion of all this is that I have a backup method for Win95, 98
and ME that isn't Windows based.  Also, with chroot, I can have a Linux
partition make itself bootable.