On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 9:12 AM, Neil Bothwick <n...@digimed.co.uk> wrote:
> On Thu, 8 Mar 2012 23:52:53 +0700, Pandu Poluan wrote:
>
>> > As an added note on this, rsync's --one-file-system (-x) flag is handy
>> > for avoiding grabbing unneeded things, but will typically leave you
>> > without the base few device nodes needed to boot the backup, those can
>> > either be grabbed from a stage3, or created with (courtesy of Linux
>> > From Scratch's section "6.2.1. Creating Initial Device Nodes"):
>> >
>> > mknod -m 600 ${backup}/dev/console c 5 1
>> > mknod -m 666 ${backup}/dev/null c 1 3
>> >
>>
>> ... or just add another rsync invocation to backup /dev ...
>
> That won't work because it will backup the full devfs mounted on /dev,
> not the files that exist in the directory itself.
>
>
> --
> Neil Bothwick
>
> Despite the cost of living, have you noticed how it remains so popular?Thanks for all the ideas. As I've not done this sort of thing before every one of them has been worth my time thinking about. I ended up going a slightly different direction, only made possible by how little disk space costs these days. Here's what I did: 1) As a chroot, on the live system I created a new Gentoo install. This is just a very basic single disk partition type install as per the Gentoo install guide. No apps, no KDE, nothing. Just the basic stuff. 2) Once that install was up & running I copied the server's world file, /etc/portage/package.*, /etc/conf.d, /etc/X/xorg.conf & a few other things into this new install and ran emerge -ek @world to get it up and running. 3) When all of that was complete and functioning, at least in the chroot, I then took the chroot offline and used rsync to get the chroot installed copied to the external drive. 4) WIth the rsync complete I then took a cut at modifying /etc/fstab to be correct for booting from the external drive. Not sure about this step at this time as I don't know for sure how the machine will name the external drive. I'm now looking to get /boot copied to the external drive, get grub installed, and then see if I can boot using that drive. Again, thanks for the ideas and keep 'em coming if you have more. Cheers, Mark
