On Wed, 2002-05-22 at 11:54, Ben Boulanger wrote: > Anyone have any experience with making an image of your disk, dropping it > to a CD and making that CD bootable? My ultimate goal is: > > Take the current image I have of a linux box > Burn it to a CD, making the CD bootable > Boot from the CD, wipe all the data back to the disk > Boot from the machine as normal. > > Has anyone done this?
I haven't, but I have a few gotcha's you will run into and some suggestions. First, the booting process for CDs is different than for hard disks. A bootable CD is in a format (called "El-Torito") that requires a floppy image (either 1.44MB or 2.88MB, I think) with what would normally be your boot floppy for your hard disk. However, you obviously need to customize that boot floppy to boot from the CD instead of disk. I believe you could just use mkbootdisk (on Red Hat at least -- it might work other distributions with a little tweaking, or, if your lucky, none) and then just customize the image it spits out. The next problem you will run into is the fact that Linux will want to write to, at a minimum, the /var filesystem. And, unfortunately, at least two files in /etc: ioctl.save, which I think has something to do with remembering the runlevel, and /etc/mtab, for mount. You can fix the mtab problem by deleting /etc/mtab and creating a link from /etc/mtab to /proc/mounts. But the entire /var filesystem, at a minimum, will need to be tarred up and made into a ramdisk that you can mount on boot and write to. Looking at your goal, you might be better off just saving the entire filesystem tree in a subdirectory and making the rest of the CD into a "rescue" CD with just the minimum tools necessary to restore it to disk. There are tools you can find on freshmeat to do this, but my experience with one of them (mkcdrec, I think it was) was at least a couple of coasters. It was a while ago though, and I only tried one, so it might be worth trying again. I suggest trying with CDRWs if you have a CDRW drive before doing it with CDRs (of course, CDRs are cheap these days, so it might not matter). Hope that helps! -- -Paul Iadonisi Senior System Administrator Red Hat Certified Engineer / Local Linux Lobbyist Ever see a penguin fly? -- Try Linux. GPL all the way: Sell services, don't lease secrets ***************************************************************** To unsubscribe from this list, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the text 'unsubscribe gnhlug' in the message body. *****************************************************************
