Debian :: Safely Back Up Partitions Before Moving Them?
Jan 28, 2011
On my laptop, squeeze has /, /boot, /usr, /home and I think /tmp /var on separate partitions. I want more space for apps and to not have to be so frugal with /home. Earlier this week I shrank sda1, freeing up 40 GB. I wanted to start moving the squeeze partitions, but GParted logically enough denied it since they were mounted, duh. I'm glad for that, because I was getting overeager and hadn't made even a full system backup.
This is one of those situations where choice, while good, makes it hard to get started. I wouldn't mind using dump, but doesn't it inefficiently copy the whole partition regardless of empty space? I figure tar could do as well, but is it a problem that it doesn't preserve all the meta info? As a starting point, I'd like to have an "quick" and safe way to make sure that if something happens while moving partitions, I can do a restore. I can progress to more optimal solutions later on, like semi- or fully automated incremental backup.
So what is a sure-fire way to do this while preserving all info? Should I stick with something like clonezilla, can I manage it from within Debian (CLI, ready-made script, GUI), is there a still better way?
I like the buttons on the left. I'm running 10.04 & I know how to move them. The problem is that changing themes will move them back right. OK, if the new theme has them on the right that's OK. But going back to the other theme doesn't change them back. They don't seem to be controlled by the theme, or I'm just not doing it right.
The bad news comes that active support for Mint6 is set to end Apr. 30. The worse news is I don't know what to do about it. Complicating this is that I have about 5 drive partitions and duplicate Mint6 operating systems because of password problems and just partitioning the drive and rebooting the OS instead of trying to fix the issue. I hear good things about Mint8, but my 80 Gig drive is getting pretty thin on partitions. I know there must be a way to safely remove the partitions and duplicate operating systems. I just don't know how to do it.
I have windows 7 and am soon to partition a large amount of my drive over to linux. I'd rather all of my computer be linux but I'm unsure how to get my files to my other partition, I don't have a thumbdrive and my email doesn't have much space. I have 300 gbs of room, 150 will be linux, how do I get the 100 gigs moved from my windows partition to my linux so I have more space on my linux.
My temp file is currently located int the root partition which is a a relatively small partition. As it is, if my root partition id more than half full I am unable to make a backup of the whole system. I would like to move that folder into the home partition and maybe even make it a hidden folder. Since a lot of apps depend on the other folders within the temp folder - what I am wondering about is whether I can just move the folder or if I need to be concerned that those apps will not be able to find the folder then. Would I end up needing to go into every app that uses it and change settings? Is there things within the o/s that use it that I would need to reconfigure or something?
Ubuntu 11.04 with the Unity Desktop on a HP ze2000
I have two "Ubuntu" installations, for the record. My HDD is laid out like so:
PRIMARY - First Ubuntu PRIMARY - Second Ubuntu [XBMC Live] 4GB Free 14GB LOGICAL -4GB Free -10GB Swap
Now, GRUB is currently on XBMC Live. I have terminal and root access if needed, and a "Live CD" ready to use. What I want to know is how I can move GRUB, preferably on its own partition but it can go back the the first partition.
Especially /var because I am running a MYSQL server on this box. I want to know if there is a safe procedure to follow to move these partitions from the current sda2 and sda3 that they are now to sdb2 and sbd3 because this is a much bigger disk. I don't want to break MYSQL and I don't want to be down for a long period. I have heard of some people suggesting a sym link to a /newvar and /newuser on sdb but I have also read this will not work when moving to a different physical drive.
I have Windows XP and OpenSuSE 11.1 installed on my laptop. I have recently removed the recovery partition provided by the laptop manufacturer (HP) to free up some space and ideally I would like to be able to add the free space to the existing Windows partition.The current partition set up is as follows:
Code: Disk size 93Gb, P = Primary, L = Logical, U = Unallocated P Windows XP 36Gb /dev/sda1 /windows
I have 1 HD with the following OSes, each on his own partition:
p1 WinXP p2 Win7 p3 Ubuntu p4 Ubuntu Studio p5 Unallocated (not actually a partition)
I intended to create a 5th partition, formatted as NTFS, for data. That's when I found out that Windows only supports 4 partitions per disk (yeah, I know, should've looked it up first). On Win7 Disk Management applet, they're all listed as "Primary Partition".
I've come up with a few possible solutions: s1. Move partitions p3 & p4 down towards the end of the HD, and add half of the available space to partition p2 (Win7) and the other half to partition p4 (Ubuntu Studio).
s2. Move partitions p3 & p4 to the end of the HD, and add all available space to partition p2 (Win7).
s3. Increase partition p4 (Ubuntu Studio) to take up all the available space.
My questions:
q1. Win7 Disk Management applet gives me no option to move or resize (other than shrink) the partitions. Does this mean I'll have to use another partition manager (e.g., gparted)?
q2. If I move the partitions p3 & p4 (both Ubuntu), will there be any impact on grub?
q3. Is there any way to turn partition p4 to extended instead of primary? If so, what are the consequences?
im using ubuntu server 64 bit on intel atom410D. when im using my SATA DRIVE as AHCI mode while i moving 4 GB files from one partition to another my server is getting so slow that it will take me to login on ssh 2 minutes. so i have seen a thing or two about a bug on it. i changed the AHCI mode to IDE mode and now it seems to work better.
F15 Gnome edition. I am trying to move files, no big deal, except they keep moving themselves back again about 4-5 seconds later. This happens in nautilus, gnome-commander, or even at the command line. See the following output. The volume is NTFS, but I have ntfs-3g installed, and i've never had this problem before with NTFS volumes.
Code: [root@kermitfed store]# ls animalstore Cymande Groundation Mutiny
Bottom line up front: I'd like to move my window controls from the right corner to the left corner in 10.04.
All of my window controls (minimize, close, etc) are back on the right hand corner of the window, and after my upgrade from 9.10 to 10.04 they were on the left. I briefly tried E16 with gnome, didn't like it, and removed all. This caused metacity to become unconfigured, and now all of the themes have window controls on the right.
Where can I fix it so the window controls are back where the 10.04 ubuntu wanted them?
from several problems with ubuntu/linux distros, just to have the compuer with main windows OS, Ubuntu as a second and backup and puppy too after a week of madness codes sudos gedits installing reinstalling 2 3 may be 7 times.the system is now quite stable (i had to erase the lucid lynx because nobody was able to help me with the problem of the missing panels. ill have to wait for a fix..
now i have a fresh install of 8.04 (i had to uninstall it because i move partitions ad grub wents down, i tried EVERYTHING and nothing but reinstalling it)i used puppy linux to extract my files (home folder) and save it int a new ext3 partition, then when this ubuntu8.04 was OK, i tried to move my files back. i tried to doit from ubuntu, and i saw a little padlock on the folder, i tryed to move it, and i cant, then i restart to tryit form puppy, i was able to doit from puppy, then i restart again back to ubuntu, now with the folder in ubuntu partition i now have to put each file/folder where it was supposed to be, but again i saw some older with the padlock icon and with the same problem, that i can't move it because i have no permission. i tryed to find some help before opening this thread but all i want was to open a gksudo nautilus on terminal, but that doesnt fix anything, because that open a wibdows and i only can move "locked" files withing that folder, and those are my files i need to move it all the time, i can't open a gksudo nautilus every time i want to move one of my files.
When ubuntu decided to move the close minimize maximize buttons to the left side, then here is your solution! i wrote this little script to help:
just go to your terminal and type this: (replacing /where/you/put/it/ with where you actually put the file) "sh /where/you/put/it/MoveButtonsToRight.sh"
Could the FOSS community instigate a free how-to e/book or pamphlet for web newbies? Released under Creative Commons and designed to teach newbies how to use the web safely and responsibly regardless of their Operating System. It could be made available in multiple formats as an ebook or printable document for download from SourceForge.
After some recent upgrade of my Debian Testing i386, on ThinkPad T400s, I am receiving panic message upon Safely Remove Drive.When I insert external HDD, it is automatically detected and the partitions mounted and works perfectly well. But when I "Safely Remove" the disk, Debian freezes and hangs. Nothing works (mouse or keyboard), and even X crashes and I get frozen terminal.I never experienced anything similar
I have Debian Lenny with a couple of libraries from backports. I go to install Wine from the package manager and it says such and such a dependency is needed but that the backports version is installed, I use force version to choose right version then it says the same for every other file so it`s going round in circles.
Some libraries, libasound and similar, are installed from backports but it seems wine wants the older version. How can I install wine without this endless loop and without breaking anything, please?
I've just installed Squeeze with KDE. I was wondering what is the best way to remove some unwanted apps without breaking everything (I want to get rid of Kopete and a few other apps like Dragon Player as I don't use them)? I tried to: apt-get remove kopete but it said it wanted to remove a whole bunch of other stuff as well. (I'm a recent Fedora convert).
Now, i'd like to join partitions sda7 and sda8 in a single partition. However, it seems that GRUB is residing on sda8, where there is a Ubuntu installation I don't need anymore, while I use the Ubuntu 9.10 installation on sda7.
To make it more clear, I see two /boot/grub dirs on both partitions, but my pc seems to use the one on sda8.
What's the correct way to handle this problem?
I believe I use Grub1.97 but I don't know if the system is showing me the "wrong" grub (on sda7) instead of the one that's really used.
Have been working most of the day on this usb full install (Jesiie xfce) trying to make it leaner/faster and trying to get rid of minor annoyances like "watchdog: watchdog0 is not shutting down" (couldn't btw), finally managed to disable "You have mail" by commenting out "session optional pam_ mail.so standard" in /etc/pam.d/login. Every little change registers in terms of seconds of boot time saved and how the system responds because, well, i'm booting from a usb 2 drive.Followed some suggestions from "Reduce Debian", removed cups-common, some foreign language locales and man pages. what i can safely do with systemctl.
I'm not sure if this is a bug in Squeeze beta 2 or if it's something I've overlooked. I have a Maxtor 250 GB external USB drive that I use for backups. It gets auto-mounted fine, always in the same place, and from my normal user account I can write to it, even delete directories on it if I want to. But when, from Gnome, I select the "Safely remove" option, I get an error to the effect that it can't stop the device. The weird thing is that the thing actually *is* unmounted. I've checked the mount point and it's no longer there.Is there some package I maybe should've installed but haven't? I'm not really worried about data loss, since I'm sure the drive wouldn't unmount unless it was properly synched; it's just the error message that bugs me.
I dual boot Windows and Ubuntu dual on my computer. I made the big mistake of moving a bunch of files directly from the ubuntu partition and now all those files are gone. How can I get them back?
Debian if I suspend the PC, will the external mounted harddisk safely umount automatically? I want to make sure that the integrity of my external HDD is not compromised while the PC goes in the suspend mode.
I have been learning Debian by using a virtual machine. After fine-tuning my installation procedure, I decided to copy that installation to my physical system. The hard drive already has another Linux based system installed. I plan to dual boot.After copying files I updated fstab and menu.lst.The partition scheme between the virtual and physical environments are similar, but the partitions are not mapped exactly the same.Thus the Debian system on the physical hard drive fails to boot simply because the initrd is created for the root partition location on the virtual machine. The initrd created in the virtual machine is looking for the root file system on /dev/hda1 whereas on my physical drive the new location is /dev/sda7.How can I rebuild the initrd on the physical system? I started to use the installation DVD in rescue mode, but I did not get too far.
I have been learning Debian by using a virtual machine. After fine-tuning my installation procedure, I decided to copy that installation to my physical system. The hard drive already has another Linux based system installed. I plan to dual boot.After copying files I updated fstab and menu.lst.
The partition scheme between the virtual and physical environments are similar, but the partitions are not mapped exactly the same.Thus the Debian system on the physical hard drive fails to boot. I think the initrd created in the virtual machine is looking for the root file system on /dev/hda1 whereas on my physical drive the new location is /dev/sda7.How can I rebuild the initrd on the physical system? Or how can I build an initrd in the virtual system that will function on the physical system.I started to use the installation DVD in rescue mode, but I did not get too far.
I have installed fedora 11, now i want to install touch driver for my dell 15 laptop. when i m moving cursur its moving but when i m clcking on touch pad to open anything its not opening, to open i have 2 select any file then i have to click touchpad keys.
I've installed years back Debian on my laptop. Last year i did upgrade, i putted an ssd in my old laptop which works great with debian.
Now I bought a new laptop, to replace my old one. Because my new laptop doesn't have an SSD installed, i want to replace the harddrive by the SSD from my old laptop.
Now so said, so done. I replaced the hard drive easy by the ssd. Now if i boot the new laptop with the ssd installed i'm getting message from EUFI/BIOS that there is no OS installed on the ssd???
Debian is installed on it! If a place back the ssd in my old laptop, it's booting like it should, so it's working. Why is EUFI/BIOS think there is no OS installed? Debian is installed on the ssd so it should work i think?
I was looking around in Xfce4 Taskmanager to see what's taking up some memory/processor power, and I noticed when I move the cursor around in cirlces, the CPU spikes from about 5%-10% clear up to about 40%. I also have Audacious2, Chromium, and a file manager open as well.
Why is this? My system is an Eee PC with a 1.6GHz Atom processor and 2GB of DDR2 RAM.
