Date: Thu, 21 Aug 2003 23:22:12 -0500 From: Doug Poland <doug@polands.org> To: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Backup and restore advise sought Message-ID: <20030822042211.GA38002@polands.org>
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Hello, I'm building a dual-boot (FreeBSD 4.8 / Windows) workstation for a friend. Initially, he wanted FBSD/WinXP so I gave approx 1/2 of the hard drive (the 1st half) to FreeBSD and the 2nd 1/2 to Win. I've installed, configured, built a custom kernel and brought FreeBSD up to -STABLE. I've also installed and and configured a bunch of big apps (mozilla, openoffice, eclipse, mysql, apache, tomcat) and I've got several hours of work into it. I really don't want to do it again. I installed WinXP onto the 2nd half of the disk and began to config it when I come to find out he has a "friend's" WinXP CD. I told him that it will be unusable after a certain amount of time if he doesn't register it and his "friend" has already registered that particular product ID. So he wisely decides not to continue with WinXP and wants to go back to his legitimately licensed WinME. Problem is, now the Windows slice is 1/2 way into a 20GB hard-drive. I'm quite sure that the Win9x/ME line cannot boot if past a certain sector on the HD. Attempts to install WinME continually fail just as the OS is about done formatting the Windows drive. I'm afraid that I have a drive layout that I can't work with in Windows. My proposed solution is this: dump each FBSD partition to backup device, and re-partition the drive. This time put the Windows stuff at the front of the HD, and FBSD at the rear. BTW, I'll recreate the FBSD slices at least as large the original slice. Since I've never used dump/restore I've got some questions. 1. I'm concerned that the FBSD partition names will change. i.e., / was ad0s3a may now become ad1s3a and so on. 2. I'm using GRUB as boot loader pointing at HD(0,0,a) for FBS and HD(0,1) for Win. That will probably change. 3. Is there anything else about dump/restore that may present a gotcha with this solution? 4. Is there a better way? I remember reading about an OpenBSD "ghost" for Unix. -- Regards, Doug
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