diskclone ext3fs using ghost?

[Jeroen_D]

Hi,

has anyone been successfull in cloning the ext3fs filesystem using Ghost or DriveImage or something else ?

I have tried DriveImage 2002 but this one does not recognize ext3fs. Ghost 7.5 and Ghost 2003 are able to clone the disk but at a very slow rate. However after the disk cloning, I cannot boot up the new disk.

Something weird during the clone is that I cannot use the same size for the partitions. Ghost resizes it a bit. After the clone operation I see GRUB but then it stops. Normally it says GRUB with some points ...

Anyone tried a disk to disk clone on a Linux with ext3fs before ?

Thanks for any info,
Jeroen.

[Kjetil Jensen]

I have only used Altiris to do software clones of ext3 , but I normally prefer to use hardware mirrors. In a server with a raid1 system drive I just pull out one disk and move it to the other server. Insert the disk and boot up to singleuser. I then rename server, delete the /etc/ssh/host_* files and go to my proper runlevel.

This only works if both servers have the same type of raidcontroller though.

Regards
Kjetil

[Jeroen_D]

I don't know Altiris. What is the productname called ?

I only need to create a spare disk. RAID is not an option here (too bad)

[Steven E. Protter]

I have cloned an entire Linux system using Norton Ghost. It was Red Hat 7.3 ext3 filesystem.


It is slow, but it has the advantage of exactly copying key configuration information.

SEP

[Jeroen_D]

Steven,

when you cloned the disk, did ghost take the exact same size for the partitions ?

Did you use special flags ? Sector by sector copying won't work since my disks aren't exactly the same size. I need native cloning.

The specialty of my linux distro is that it is SecurePlatform. That is a RedHat based hardened linux by Check Point. It is designed by them for firewall usage. I don't think however that they have enforced some sort of unclonable sectors.

Jeroen.

[Kjetil Jensen]

Altitis is probably overkill for you, but it is a nice piece of software. Check out www.altiris.com/hp

Have you tried to boot up cd in repair mode to fix Grub bootblock?