Hardware :: Swap Boot HDD To Alternate Computer?
Sep 24, 2010
I have two almost identical computers -- identical model & type designator; minor difference in hardware details. Both boxes have an installed and running Ubuntu -- one Lucid (v10.04 LTS) and one Jaunty (v9.04). Consider box-A with drive-A and box-B with drive-B. Q1: If I swap drive-A to box-B and drive-B to box-A, is system startup clever enough to work around any minor hardware differences?
I know! "It depends..."
One minor difference is the wifi card. Both are Intel -- one is the 3945 while the other is the 4965. Another difference is partition sizes and mount points. Another difference is RAM size -- 3GB vs. 4GB. Another difference is the specific brand and specs for DVD=RW. I could go on, but the differences seem minor if not trivial.
I have a reason for such a swap that makes sense to me. I simply want to make sure that the system startup will figure out what is different. Q2: Is there some command or utility to run after I make the swap that will add-remove packages and make the install on drive-A better matched to box-B, etc?
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Aug 10, 2010
I have a Centos 5.5 system with 2* 250 gig sata physical drives, sda and sdb. Each drive has a linux raid boot partition and a Linux raid LVM partition. Both pairs of partitions are set up with raid 1 mirroring. I want to add more data capacity - and I propose to add a second pair of physical drives - this time 1.5 terabyte drives presumably sdc and sdd. I assume I can just plug in the new hardware - reboot the system and set up the new partitions, raid arrays and LVMs on the live system. My first question:
1) Is there any danger - that adding these drives to arbitrary sata ports on the motherboard will cause the re-enumeration of the "sdx" series in such a way that the system will get confused about where to find the existing raid components and/or the boot or root file-systems? If anyone can point me to a tutorial on how the enumeration of the "sdx" sequence works and how the system finds the raid arrays and root file-system at boot time
2) I intend to use the majority of the new raid array as an LVM "Data Volume" to isolate "data" from "system" files for backup and maintenance purposes. Is there any merit in creating "alternate" boot partitions and "alternate" root file-systems on the new drives so that the system can be backed up there periodically? The intent here is to boot from the newer partition in the event of a corruption or other failure of the current boot or root file-system. If this is a good idea - how would the system know where to find the root file-system if the original one gets corrupted. i.e. At boot time - how does the system know what root file-system to use and where to find it?
3) If I create new LVM /raid partitions on the new drives - should the new LVM be part of the same "volgroup" - or would it be better to make it a separate "volgroup"? What are the issues to consider in making that decision?
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Feb 5, 2010
I have a Dell Inspirion 5150. The onboard sound card was blown 3 years ago. OS is Ubuntu 8.10. I am also a HAM radio operator and use the computer for digital modes using a USB device that acts as an external sound card modem for me.
The program that I use for that is fldigi. The device is Signalink USB by Tigertronics. the device has the ability to have speakers plugged in to it. Question: Is there a way to have the computer send the audio out the USB cable to the device?
I have looked at my sound settings and there are USB devices but none of them are the one(s) that I use with my Signalink device. If it can't be done, no worries -- have not really needed it so far. Just something nice to have.
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Jun 19, 2010
Today I decided to replace my 9.04 install with 10.04. (I did this on a separate hard disk.) As I am a big fan of LVM I used the 'Alternate' install CD. Everything installed fine.
However, upon booting I observed two things: firstly there was no grub menu. No countdown timer, no menu. Just a flickering cursor. After 15 seconds or so I got a message telling me that:
Code:
/dev/mapper/bromine-root (My root partition.) does not exist and that it had given up waiting. Finding this kind of strange I tried the alpha of 10.10 --- same again. Hence I have two questions: firstly, where did the nice grub menu go; secondly, what is wrong with LVM and grub these days? At the initframfs prompt I am thrown to there are some LVM utilities and they appear to show my volumes.
Switching back to my old pair of hard disks and everything works as expected (i.e, the hardware is fine and supported by Linux.)
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Feb 6, 2011
How can one create an alternate disk or boot path on a ubuntu server? I have a new server running 9.10 and have a full backup of an old server which had all the configuration and installed softwares, etc. Instead of trying to reinstall everything and configure it the way it was, I was thinking of adding another disk to the server, mount it and then hopefully be able to boot it from there. I don't have any LVM or mirroring setup but was hoping if I can specify a secondary boot path when the server boots up, if it fails I should be able to go back to the current one.
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Jan 26, 2010
I have Redhat linux 4 and 5, I need to know if there is a way to create an alternate/standalone boot drive to recover a system from a disaster.
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May 14, 2010
After using slackpkg to update to -current on a new slack(32) install I was greeted with kernel panic "can't mount root fs" on reboot.
It was looking in the wrong place. I thought I answered yes and slackpkg would run lilo for me when it was done with the upgrade but perhaps I misunderstood.
I had my handy dandy USB boot stick so I set the bios and booted from USB. OK fine, I pointed to the correct location (hda1) and voila.
a 64bit kernel... The machine in question is a 2004 vintage celeron notebook
To my question: Is there a way I can point the loader to another kernel?
One last piece of the puzzle, the dvd drive is bad and I don't (yet) have a PXE server or even another linux box.
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Mar 7, 2010
I'm running 9.10 off of a 4 GiB CF card. I keep running into space issues with updates, so I purchased an 8 GiB replacement card. I've cloned the 4 GiB card to a .IMG file using DD.I've then copied the 4 GiB image back to the 8 GiB card using the Ubuntu startup disk creator program. Once done, I'm able to properly boot off of the new 8 GiB clone.Unfortunately, the clone ends up with 3.67 GiB of unallocated space at the end *see attached). I tried deleting the "extended" partition that the swap is located at after booting from a Live CD and the system was unable to boot after this. I was thinking that I would delete the swap entirely and create a swap file after I merged the existing partitions, but I was unable to do this.
best way to do this (e.g. get one large 8 GiB partition with my old image on it)? I still have the original untouched 4 GiB card and also have an external CF drive if I need to redo the cloning. I've also used Clonezilla before, so perhaps there's a way to do this that allow me to grow the image as it's being cloned.
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Feb 16, 2011
I have a Windows XP system, and wanted to install Ubuntu to a 100 GB XT3 partition on the same drive. I was told I could chainload Ubuntu from the NT Loader menu. I booted from a Ubuntu 10.04 CD and ran the installer. It didn't find any hard drives. On a hunch, I tried the 10.04 alternate installer CD. That DID find the hard drive and partitions. I had the installer make /dev/sda7 (the XT3 partition) the root. Installation proceeded smoothly, but then the installer told me it did not see any other OS's on my drive! Why? I directed the installer to place grub on /dev/sda7 instead of the MBR.
Per the instructions I was given, I used DD to copy the first 512 bytes of /dev/sda7 to the Windows primary partition (sda1) as bootloader.lnx. But the resulting file is empty, and it won't boot. I repeated the whole process - formatting, installing FOUR times, and same results. I have no idea where GRUB was installed. It is apparently not in the MBR, because I still have my normal Windows boot. I downloaded the 10.10 alternate installer and got the same exact results. Even switched from XT3 to XT4. After two weeks of this nonsense, I still have yet to see Linux boot.
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Aug 6, 2011
when i try to boot the 11.04 64-bit alternate.iso i get the following message, after it says that isolinux blabla is loaded: EDD: Error 8000 reading sector 2855 and when i remove the cd it says: gfx.c32: not a COM32R imageand then there is a grub-shell.
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Sep 9, 2010
My swap is not mounted at boot. get it to mount again? I CAN make it mount after booting but I need to hibernate. I read that I have to edit /etc/fstab but I'm not quite sure as to what I have to do specifically.
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Nov 17, 2010
Does any one have any clue about booting linux live CD with no swap space enabled.
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Sep 10, 2010
Maybe what I am trying to do doesn't work but let me explain. I have two identical drives on my PC.
/dev/sda = 1 TB
/dev/sdb = 1 TB
I wanted to mirror the drives so I created two separate partitions on each drive:
sda1 = 1024 MB (Swap)
sda2 = 999 GB (Software RAID)
sdb1 = 1024 (Swap)
sdb2 = 999 GB (Software RAID)
I then only created /dev/md0 which consist of /dev/sda2 & /dev/sdb2 in RAID 1 mirror.
When I boot the system, I show that Swap fails during boot in bright 'red' letters. I don't know if it failed activating both or just any swap partitions in general. When I look at 'df -h' while my system is booted, I show:
Code:
[root@buster ~]# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev 10M 168K 9.9M 2% /dev
/dev/md0 997G 847M 992G 1% /
shm 997M 0 997M 0% /dev/shm
Does this mean that only 1 swap partition activated successfully and the 2nd one failed? Should I mirror the two swap partitions into /dev/md1?
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Mar 20, 2011
Does one need to Check the Swap filesystem, from time to time
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Dec 7, 2010
Lucid on an Acer Travelmate800.Can anyone tell me why I have 0k for swap space? I allocated swap which I can see in my Disk Utility's 'volumes' display.
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Jul 15, 2010
For some time now - every time I reboot my computer the swap drive is not mounting. I have to manually mount (Swapon) it via GParted. Using the sudo mount -a does not seem to have an effect.can Anyone tell me what is going onhere is my fstab:
# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
[code]...
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Aug 15, 2010
all when installing my linux i dind't create a swap partition.now i'd like to use one.so i've create a swap partition.So how to mount it and let the system use it.
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Aug 16, 2010
RAM for older machines like I use is fairly cheap these days. But flash memory is just as cheap or cheaper. So I'd like to ask about the feasibility of expanding my system's memory using flash memory. And about whether creating a partition for swap on the flash memory, or whether a swap file on the flash device, is the better way to go.
By flash memory I have in mind mainly USB sticks or what are sometimes called "pen drives." But I do also have CF and SD cards that, with the proper cheap adapter (one of which I already own for adapting CF) could be used to create extra swap space. So, what is the current consensus on the feasibility/advisability of using flash memory for swap? I've read about the limited write cycles of flash being an argument against using it for swap. But recent reading indicates to me that the limited write cycles problem applies mostly to older, smaller-capacity flash memory. Some will come out and say that, for larger-capacity flash memory, the life of the device is likely to exceed the amount of time your current computer will be useful (I think I've seen estimates in the range of 3-4 years life--minimum--for newer, higher-capacity flash memory).
A more persuasive argument I've heard against using flash memory for swap is that access times for these devices can be much slower than SATA, and maybe even IDE, hard drives. That would certainly dictate against using flash memory for swap.
So, how about some input on this issue? Anyone using flash memory for swap? If so, what kind (e.g., usb stick or SD/CF)? Are you using a swap file or a swap partition? How's system performance? Likewise, has anyone had flash-memory-used-as-swap die on them? The consequences would undoubtedly be dire. Also, has anyone measured flash memory access times to confirm or refute claims about slow access times? Are some types of flash memory better/worse than others in terms of access times?
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Apr 15, 2010
I found what I believe to be odd behavior on an OpenSuSE 11.0 computer today. I needed to add some disk space on one of our computers and here is what I did: This computer had a separate disk for swap space so I deactivated swap (swapoff -a) and then removed the swap entry from /etc/fstab. I then shut down the computer and replaced what was a single disk used only for swap with a RAID1 hardware mirror.
I then booted the system and added a swap partition and another file system on the new RAID1 volume. Even after activating the new swap space with swap on, no swap ever seems to be actually allocated. The swap space shows up in top, free, "swap -s" and vmstat, but never gets used. I realize that a reboot will result in the swap being used, but is there anyway to get the kernel to use the swap without a reboot.
It's probably worth noting that I verified this behavior on a second computer. That is I turned off swap, removed the swap entry in /etc/fstab and then rebooted. Swap is never actually allocated until a second reboot. By the way, this was discovered when some of our users attempted to run java on the system where I did the first work and they got:
prompt> java -version
Error occurred during initialization of VM
Could not reserve enough space for object heap
Could not create the Java virtual machine.
Yesterday, java was working fine and I got the same results on my test computer. Is this a kernel bug or just odd behavior?
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May 10, 2010
I was unsatisfied with the 40second boot time of lucid and was searching for a solution for a while but didn't find anything yet. But today I found a way to boot 10seconds quicker.Lucid is installed here as suggested by the installer:
Primary rootpartition (/dev/sda1)
Logical partition (/dev/sda4)
swap (/dev/sda5)
[code]....
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Feb 3, 2011
With my ubuntu iso in the dvd drive, I do not get any boot from options for it to be used as boot drive within the boot order from the boot control panel. On startup with the alt key pressed I only get the Mac drive but when I change the boot to the other option (network) and press the alt key on startup, I get the boot order screen with the Mac HD and also the Ubuntu iso but cannot get the Ubuntu to highlight and use, just the Mac remains highlighted. On the same screen I get a very small wrist watch to the left of the screen that the mouse can move up and down but not to the side.
I am using a windows usb keyboard and usb mouse, I have used all manner of keyboard combinations to get the Ubuntu disc to highlight but nothing seems to work. Within the drive section, the "My Mac" drive is locked and cannot partition it or change anything about it. Has anyone any ideas that I can try? I did not want to get a Mac keyboard and Mouse as yet seeing as I wish to change the operating system to ubuntu.
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May 11, 2011
I know its a long shot, but still...
Is it possible to change size of boot and swap without doing a fresh install?
this is how my volume dist is like - root -30 gb, boot 200 mb, swap 8gb, home - 110 gb
my laptop is an amd turion dual core TL-58, with 2 gb ram and 160 gb hard disk...
and i want to change it to what is generally recommended ie boot to 500mb or 1 gb and swap to 4 gb..
the remaining can be added to home...
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Mar 29, 2010
I've just upgraded my wife's netbook to UNR 9.10. This seemed to go well and the netbook has been working fine since. Yesterday my daughter used the netbook with out any issues, but when my wife tried it halted during boot with:
Swap waiting for UUID: xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
After a couple of reboots it started working fine, but looking at /etc/fstab the entry for swap is different to the UUID shown in blkid Do I just update fstab with the UUID from blkid?
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Apr 17, 2010
So my Ubuntu 9.10 install has been hanging on boot lately. At first I thought it was a problem with the 2.6.31-20 kernel, because that is the default boot option in GRUB2. It seemed things worked fine if I instead chose the 2.6.31-19 kernel, but I had that hang yesterday too.I also had 2.6.31-20 boot just fine yesterday. Once. Next time I tried it - system hang.
What I mean by "hang" is,I would see the GRUB OS selection screen (I have 2 versions of Windows and 2 versions of Ubuntu on this machine),select the first choice (Ubuntu with the 2.6.31-20 kernel),see the "pulsating white Ubuntu logo" briefly,then a bunch of scrolling text, then...blank screen.Then nothing.I let it sit for a few minutes to a few hours when it did this, but nothing further happened.Then yesterday, I decided to let it sit the whole time I was at work, approximately 9 hours.I came home to a screen with the white Ubuntu logo and the following error message:
Code:
One or more of the mounts listed in /etc/fstab cannot yet be mounted:
swap: waiting for UUID=3fba81a3-de14-4f56-9e7b-ace95d933a0e
/proc/bus/usb: waiting for none[code]....
So it looks like I have a disk partition that refuses to mount sometimes.Gparted for some reason wouldn't tell me the UUIDs of swap partitions.They also don't show up in /dev/disk/by-uuid. Using the bootinfo script, I found out that 3fba81a3-de14-4f56-9e7b-ace95d933a0e is the 4 GB swap partition associated with my Ubuntu 9.10 install.The disk that partition is on is rated "healthy" by Disk Utility, with only a few bad sectors. The HDD is about 7 years old, so it's in remarkably good shape.What could cause this swap partition to not mount during boot, and how do I fix it?
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Oct 9, 2010
When I installed Debian stable on a headless machine of mine, I configured a partition with LUKS encryption (intended for swap), but told the installer not to use it. After installation, I configured that encrypted partition as swap and mounted it. I wanted my headless machine to boot all the way without manual intervention, so I can log in via ssh and mount my encrypted partitions.However, since the kernel was updated (and the initrd regenerated), the machine now waits during boot for me to enter the swap encryption password, but no others, only the swap.I have been unable to find in my searchings how the initrd is generated with that setting or how I can change it, preferably permanently so future regenerated initrd's don't try activating my encrypted swap on boot. Does anyone know how to configure a Debian style initrd generator to generate an initrd that will not try to activate swap?
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Feb 28, 2011
I have a RHEL4 system with 2 250GB physical volumes. There is a boot partition that is outside LVM and 2 logical volumes (swap and root) within a single volume group. This volume group bridges the 2 physical volumes.
I would like to clone this system onto a single 1 TB physical volume that will replace the 2x250GB currently in use.
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Feb 19, 2010
I know it's possible, but does anyone have a URL or tutorial on how to do this?
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Oct 16, 2009
I'll start by explaining what my system layout currently is. I have Fedora 11 X64 installed on my system, it is an HP Dv9380ca laptop. My system has 2 hdd /dev/sda /dev/sdb. During the setup i set my home directory to reside on /dev/sdb. After booting i realized that my root and swap partition are part of a volume group name vg_sharpfed and are set in fstab as:
/dev/mapper/vg_sharpyfed-lv_root / ext4 defaults 1 1
/dev/mapper/vg_sharpyfed-lv_swap swap swap defaults 0 0
Output of Fdisk -l /dev/sda
Disk /dev/sda: 120.0 GB, 120034123776 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14593 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x1aecda8d
[code]....
My /dev/sda2 partitions is 100gigs and set as an LVM. Essentially what i am getting at is, if it's possible to temporarily copy / /boot and swap to my second partition, edit grub if needed and fstab to mount to the temp locations, format sda to ext4 create partitions for / /boot and swap partitions, then copy back the original directories edit required fstab to mount the original locations and no longer have them contained in a Logical volume.
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Mar 21, 2011
I've been a long time Windows user, but I've started a small firm and because of lack of funds, I've decided to install Ubuntu on my company's PCs.I have 8 PCs in total - 6 of them with Intel CPUs, and the last two with AMD CPUs. I bought the extra two computers because I've managed to find an extra two people to work at my company, and AMD-based PCs are cheaper so I've decided to buy them instead of Intel.Long-story short, I've installed Ubuntu 9.10 and boot time takes about half-an-hour. After the computers finally boot, USB hardware doesn't work at all. I was forced to buy PS/2 keyboards & mice and they both work fine after the PCs boot.I don't know what's causing this delay.I've enabled Cool 'n Quiet from BIOS.I've tried several instructions like editing the /etc/modules file.I've installed cpufreqd, tried to configure it, but it didn't work.I've check the CPU stats and my CPUs are running at 800MHz. I can't believe nobody managed to fix the 800MHz problem as I've noticed it's quite common among AMD Ubuntu users. I think I've tried almost anything that I've found on this forum.I can't keep asking my employees not to reboot their PCs. Both Chrome/Firefox crash a lot on Ubuntu so they're forced to restart their computers.The computer specs are: AMD Athlon II X2 240 dual-core @ 2.800MHz, 2GB RAM, 500GB HDD, etc.
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Mar 20, 2011
(This is for a 100% Clean install)
Q1) I was wondering if it is possible to Dual boot Ubuntu with Windows XP on a 1TB RAID-0 setup ?
Q2) Also, is it possible to create a SWAP partition (for Ubuntu) on a NON RAID-0 HDD ?
Q3) Lastly... I read GRUB2 is the default boot manager... should I use that, or GRUB / Lio ?
I have a total of 3 HDDs on this system:
-- 2x 500GB WDD HDDs (non-advanced format) ... RAID-0 setup
-- 1x 320GB WDD HDD (non RAID setup)
(The non RAID HDD is intended to be a SWAP drive for both XP and Ubuntu = 2 partitions)
I plan on making multiple partitions... and reserve partition space for Ubuntu (of course).
I have the latest version of the LiveCD created already.
Q4) Do I need the Alternate CD for this setup?
I plan on installing XP before Ubuntu.
This is my 1st time dual booting XP with Ubuntu.
I'm using these as my resources:
- [url]
- [url]
Q5) Anything else I should be aware of (possible issues during install)?
Q6) Lastly... is there anything like the AHCI (advanced host controller interface) like in Windows for Ubuntu?
(Since I need a special floppy during Windows Install...) I want to be able to use the Advanced Queuing capabilities of my SATA drives in Ubuntu.
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