Making drive images

[Rick Stevens]

Harold Hallikainen wrote:
> In my never ending quest to be able to recover my server within minutes of
> its failure, I've made a couple drive images using Norton Ghost. One drive
> holds /home . The other holds everything else. My new backup drives are
> 80G while the old drives are 40G. It appears Norton wants to change the
> partition sizes. When I plug these new drives into the server, I get as
> far as GRUB GRUB on the screen, then everything stops. If I only replace
> the /home drive (keeping the original drive that holds everything else),
> RH8 complains that it cannot find /home during bootup.

Is this after ghost resizes the partitions or do you force it to keep
the same partition size?  Also, which filesystem are you using?

> My /home drive is the IDE primary slave, while the "everything else" drive
> is the primary master. I copy stuff to the secondary slave slot (I'm using
> Promise Fast Swap 66 drive enclosures). Because the drives may take on
> being master or slave, I've got the new 80G backup drives set as "cable
> select" instead of master or slave. The BIOS seems to properly identify
> the drives based on where they're plugged in.

Cable select is highly dangerous.  While you've had luck so far, I
wouldn't continue to use it.

> So... what do I do to get a bootable system on the new drives? I suspect
> the problem is the difference in size. I tried to tell Norton Ghost to set
> the partition sizes the same, but there was one point where I keyed in a
> size of 101 to match the old size, and it changed to 109 as I moved away
> from that field. I suspect that MAY be due to a different number of heads?

Uhm, hmmm.  Well, that's entirely possible.  Do you have the BIOS set up
to use LBA mode?  I ask because many BIOS' will work with 40GB drives in
CHS mode, but have issues with 80GB drives unless they're in LBA mode
(which is a better mode to use anyway, IMHO--but I'm an old SCSI guy).

If you're not in LBA mode, be warned:  Sometimes you can switch, but not
always.  If I were you, I'd hook up your new 80GB drives on the
secondary controller, then reboot and get into your BIOS.  See if you
can set JUST the secondary controler to LBA mode, then do the ghost (do
the "everything else" drive first).  Then, shut down, swap out the 
"everthing else" drive, set the BIOS to LBA mode for that drive and try
a reboot.  I'm not guaranteeing this will work, but it's worth a shot.

> Anyway, can this be done? I'd like to now and then just make an image of
> each drive in the system. Should a drive die, I just plug in the backup.
> If it CAN be done, how do I accomplish it (perhaps not using Norton
> Ghost).

Well, we've used ghost to do it on dissimilar drives (and even slightly
different hardware), but the systems were SCSI-based (essentially LBA
mode).  The only problems we ran into was that the original mobos were
aic7xxx based and the new mobos were aic79xx based necessitating a
rescue boot, editing of the /etc/[modules|modprobe].conf file for the
right SCSI controller, rebuild of the initrd images and a reboot.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
-    If Windows isn't a virus, then it sure as hell is a carrier!    -
----------------------------------------------------------------------