[vox-tech] How to make an OEM style "system recovery disk"

Thu, 07 Nov 2002 12:47:49 -0800

I realize this discussion is a few days old, but I had something to add.

Norton Ghost is pretty darn cool and supports ext2 filesystems.  It will allow
you to build a mulit-cdr(w) image of a complete filesystem.  So you can have you
exact system tweaked with all the setting, applications, etc. written in
compressed format across several disks.  Then you can restore with Norton's
floppy or your first CD (if your system supports boot from CDROM).  The only
think you need Windows for is to make the original floppies.  I've tested this
with both win2k and linux.  The restore works great.  The only danger is if you
don't test right away, because if disk 3 of 7 (for example is shot) the whole
image is worthless.  This is a proprietery solution, but works well.

Also, has anyone tried Gentoo's UT2003 live image?  This is an ISO that boots
into a live Gentoo Linux, with Nvidia drivers, and a few popular sound drivers,
and allows you to run UT2003 off a bootable CDROM.  Nothing to do with restoring
a system, but interesting.

Dave

Ryan Castellucci wrote:

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> On Monday 28 October 2002 09:26 pm, Peter Jay Salzman wrote:
> > begin Ryan Castellucci <ryan+lugod@cal.net>
> >
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> > > I'm looking to build a bootable CD to give to a friend along with a
> > > computer that when booted will offer to overwrite the hard drive from a
> > > compressed disk image. I looked on freshmeat, but didn't see anything
> > > well suited to this. The box in question will have windows on it (They
> > > want windows, I don't feel like arguing). Anyone know of a project that
> > > can do this?
> >
> > i'm not sure i understand.  are you giving your friend a "nag-ware"
> > computer that nags him to install linux?  :)
>
> Well, the windows installation (98se) crashes unusualy often (I got about 3
> error messages about invalid page faults the first time it booted.  It's
> rather old (K6-2 300), and I was going to put linux on it, but she wanted
> windows. This is a female friend who currently has a pre 486 pc and can't
> really afford a new one. I do not think she should have any problems with a
> minimal linux install aside from figuring out what does what. AFAIK she wants
> mainly Yahoo messenger, a web browser and an office suite,
>
> It's kind of a problem, give her a pirated copy of windows, which is what she
> wants, or a Linux install that will probably meet her needs fine.
>
> Debian with gnome would probably be fine
>
> > > What about linux boot CDs that can easily be customized to run a shell
> > > script at boot time?
> >
> > not sure i understand this either.   the whole runlevel initialization
> > mechanism is a method of executing shell scripts at boot.   boot CD's
> > should have this too.
> >
> > when you say "easy", do you mean not having to conform to the standard
> > initialization script format?  you can use rc.boot for that.
>
> That will do, problem is finding a bootable CD to start with. I was going to
> use LNX-BBC, but they don't appear to have sorce snapshots of the 1.x
> available. From the FAQ
>
> "All of the 1.x versions of the BBC and LNX-BBC were built by taking binaries
> from a variety of sources (hand-compiled, out of Debian packages, etc) and
> just throwing them together. As of September 2002, there has not yet been a
> release of the LNX-BBC that uses the GAR tree."
>
> What i mean by easy, is somthing that will be easy to make changes to and
> rebuild.
>
> tomsrtbt would be good, but I'm not sure how to modify it to work with a CD.
> The ElTorito boot image seems to be broken.
>
> > if you want to make an OEM style recovery disk, i imagine you can
> > install linux and then dd/bzip2 up the entire hard drive.  i'm guessing
> > that even if windows gets installed on top of linux, dd will restore
> > partition info.   the backup image shouldn't be too big for a fresh
> > install.  but your friend would lose all his data.
>
> I know, but it _will_ fix nearly anything broken.
>
> yes, dd will restore partition info, I've tried it.
>
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