From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Thu Jan 15 08:53:02 2009 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id DB39B106564A for ; Thu, 15 Jan 2009 08:53:02 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from kkb@breathsense.com) Received: from vps.breathsense.com (vps.breathsense.com [66.117.157.61]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id C75AD8FC17 for ; Thu, 15 Jan 2009 08:53:01 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from kkb@breathsense.com) Received: (qmail 55581 invoked by uid 89); 15 Jan 2009 08:26:01 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO ?192.168.1.5?) (69.181.11.54) by vps.breathsense.com with SMTP; 15 Jan 2009 08:26:01 -0000 User-Agent: Microsoft-Entourage/11.3.3.061214 Date: Thu, 15 Jan 2009 00:26:17 -0800 From: Kurt Bigler To: Message-ID: Thread-Topic: setting up bootable copy of server on my home PC Thread-Index: Acl26u+KLlpy5uLeEd2umQAf81G8oA== Mime-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit Subject: setting up bootable copy of server on my home PC X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Thu, 15 Jan 2009 08:53:03 -0000 I'm running a small server based on FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE (GENERIC). I hope to be able to create an bootable copy of the server at home, and so I freed up enough partition space on my PC, using a gparted CD, which is what someone suggested I use. The PC is running Vista. I defragmented and then reduced the Vista partition size, leaving me 120GB for two 58GB unix partitions and a generous 4GB swap area. I'm tentatively ignoring what is perhaps a typical protocol of having separate partitions for /, /usr, and /var for the system at home, lumping all 3 together instead, with my 2nd unix partition being used for web and email hierarchies that are symlinked to from somewhere within /var and /usr. I realize that will complicate the rsync a little since my server has /usr and /var on separate partitions, but I think it can be made to work. Then my plan was to run FreeBSD off a live-CD in order to initialize the disk partitions and run rsync to copy the filesystems from my server, and for that purpose I chose TrueBSD because the current release is based on FreeBSD 7.1. I'm hoping that the server and my home PC are sufficiently compatible for the same kernel (i.e. obtained via rsync) to boot on either box. So set me straight if this seems unrealistic--but it seems like FreeBSD does quite a range of dynamic hardware detection. I got the TrueBSD live CD (maybe it was DVD) booted, and tried running fdisk (whose manual page I can barely understand) and it complains that the partition table is not fdisk-compatible, but it refers to the "in-core disklabel", so I'm thinking it may not be reading the correct partition table (from the hard drive). I could go into more detail, but I figure the above will probably give someone sufficient info to shoot my plan down, point me to a better strategy, or with any luck confirm the basic plan and give me a few hints. Someone else did the initial FreeBSD install for me to set up my server, so I'm not savvy of that part of the process, but hope to be able to achieve this goal in a relatively straightforward way, creating a bootable copy of the server via rsync without doing a fresh install. Thanks for any thoughts. -Kurt Bigler