Subject: Installation Questions

From: [email-masked] (Austin Godber)
Date: Sat, 22 Feb 2003 17:03:03 -0700

Mark Phillips wrote:
> Austin,
> 
> I don't have a linux machine with enough disk space. However, I do have an 
> external firewire drive with enough space. How can create a backup image of 
> my win2K drive on that drive, and then restore it if needed?
> 
> Thanks for helping me think out of the box!

If Knoppix has support for firewire then you may be in luck.  Just boot 
with ths Knoppix CD see if Knoppix can mount the drive, if so, then just 
  dump your Win2k image onto that drive (much like my previous mail, 
except you wont be putting it on a mounted samba share it will just be 
the fw drive, which will be faster).

Sadly, I don't own any firewire hardware so I can't say whether knoppix 
supports it or not.  Maybe someone else knows.  I kinda browsed around 
the knoppix web site and didn't find anything obvious ... yeah wait I 
did.  There is an option for "nofirewire" on boot up so it must support 
firewire.  Give it a shot.

Once you are booted type "dmesg |less" and see if it says anything that 
looks like it is associating a firewire device with a disk device (I 
don't know exactly how this will look).  But with IDE you see it mention 
/dev/hda ... or with SCSI you will see /dev/sd0.  Once you know what 
device the firewire drive shows up as then you can check to see what 
partitions are present on the drive (if you are not sure) using fdisk. 
So type something like "fdisk /dev/firewiredevice"

[Oh for this, and mounting, you will have to be root, so after knoppix 
starts up and gives you an X session hit Ctrl+Alt+F1 to get a root 
console (you can hit Alt+F5 or F7 to get back to X).]

Figure out what partition on the drive you will use.  "p" prints out the 
partition tables, "q" wuits without saving.  Once you have figured out 
which partition then you can mount that partition using the mount command:

mount -t filesystemtype /dev/fwdevice<partition#> /mnt/test

then you can ls /mnt/test and see that the files you expect to be on the 
firewire drive are there.  If so then you can backup to that path.

Then hopefully you wont need the backup.  Actually things go pretty 
smoothly in an install. so its not all that much to worry about.

Austin