by I'm still a relative newbie, so please keep that in context as you
read.
I have been running RH 5.0 (kernel 2.0.31) for about 2 yrs (at home, and
I am not computer professional). I have come to the conclusion it is
time for a system upgrade, and a stab at a different distro.
Currently my RH system occupies 1.5G on my 6G drive (a single linux
native partition, hda1). I like the setup, and although it has some
deficiencies, I want to preserve it. I have read many favorable
comments about DebIan and its system upgrade utility, apt-get. My desire
has become to repartition the drive to 2G (for the ol' RH system) and 4G
for the new DebIan system. A 64MB partition will be set up for swap.
Therefore, approximately:
hda1 linux native (83) 2G
hda2 linux native (83) 4G
hda3 linux swap (82) 64MB
But before I go willy-nilly into rapartitionville using fdisk, I need to
backup my entire current system onto a second drive (the old Windows
drive - that must stay Win system). I believe the way to go about this
is to use, tar. Can I tar my entire system, while it is being used as
the current system? That is, "tar cvf /system.tar -P /". Or, is the
correct approach to use something like the tar utility on Tom's root
boot disk with my current system (/hda1) and the win drive (hdc5) in
/mnt? That is, "tar cvf /mnt/hdc5/system.tar /mnt/hda1".
I tried Tom's root boot disk, just to see what it looks like, and I'm
wondering if it sees my entire system. For example, I keep all the RPMs
I download in a directory, "/usr/local/download". When I booted using
Tom's disk, I couldn't see this directory. I didn't try with other
directories 3 levels deep, so my conviction as to this being a Tom's
idiosyncrasy or my own ignorance is unclear.
With the system backed-up, I would then repartition and format the
drive, as shown above, with Tom's root boot disk.
Then, using Tom's root boot disk, I would restore the system onto the
now smaller /hda1 partition. That is, "gzip -d < /mnt/hdc5/system.tar.gz
| tar -xvf -". Do I need to hand edit the /etc/fstab file to correspond
to the new drive partitions? Do I need to turn on the bootable flag
(with fdisk) on the hda1 partition? It isn't currently boot flagged in
the partition table (fdisk -l).
Then, if everything goes well, pull Tom's disk, reboot, and voila, my
old system on a fresh 2G partition.
The DebIan system is on its way from cheap*bytes. Once received, I can
load it on hda2, edit the lilo.conf file (& run lilo), and have working,
potentially dual boot, RH and DebIan box.
Well, does this sound like a viable approach?
Barry