Backup and restore advise sought

[Matthew Seaman]

On Thu, Aug 21, 2003 at 11:22:12PM -0500, Doug Poland wrote:

> 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.

Sounds like a good plan to me.
 
> 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.

Yes, this will happen, but not in the way you've shown: ad0s3a is the
first partition (a) on the 3rd slice (s3) of the primary master disk
(ad0).  ad1s3a is on the primary slave drive (ad1).  What you should
probably see is the current partitions are

       ad0s1a, ad0s1b, etc.

And when you swap your FreeBSD and Windows slices, that should change
to:

       ad0s2a, ad0s2b, etc.

I recommend that when you copy the partitions, edit the /etc/fstab
file and put in the new device names before you copy.  Preferably
restore the original fstab, and test that you can reboot using the new
slices before you install WinME over the original FreeBSD slice.
 
> 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.

Yes.
 
> 3.  Is there anything else about dump/restore that may present a
> gotcha with this solution?  

Shouldn't be any problems given what you say about sizing everything
above.  Instead of using sysinstall, you might consider using the
basic fdisk, disklabel and newfs commands -- they're more powerful and
flexible than sysinstall but not so easy to use.
 
> 4.  Is there a better way?  I remember reading about an OpenBSD
> "ghost" for Unix.  

As far as I know, all of the Unix "ghost" programs are essentially
scripts build around dump and restore.

	Cheers,

	Matthew

-- 
Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil.                       26 The Paddocks
                                                      Savill Way
PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey         Marlow
Tel: +44 1628 476614                                  Bucks., SL7 1TH UK
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