Ignite CD Image Too Big

[Mark Duffy]

I'm looking for some pointers here.

I'm making an Ignite image of a 1.5Gb vg00 to be eventually stored on a bootable CD.

I've successfully made the make_sys_image which was 500MB in size, built my config files, modified these to point to DSK rather than NET, ran make_medialif, built an HFS file system, ran the dd, then wrapped the LIF file around the image with make_medialif.

My bootable image to copy onto CD is now an incredible 2.1GB in size!!

Have I made an error along the line here somewhere? How can I get around this?

I've read on here about the version of gzip (1.2.4a) that can zip file sizes over 2GB and I installed this before running the make_sys_image but that didn't solve the problem.

Any help appreciated,

Mark

[Patrick Wallek]

I think the problem you are running into is that your bootable image that you put on the CD can't be gziped. I think Ignite only uses gzip when you are working with an Ignite server and doing a make_net_recovery, and then doing the install from the server. The install process has to know how to gunzip the file and I don't think that can be done via a CD.

[Carlos Fernandez Riera]

What I remember is you must create a lvol, then follow all steps you describe and finaly do a dd of rlvol to get a complete image on Filesystem.

Are your lvol of 2.1 Gb???...

about gzip question, make_sys_image use it by default so your 1,5 GB are reduced to 500Mb, this is all your system image reduced.

Try again with a lvol of 600, or up 740 Mb.

[Mark Duffy]

Carlos,

I forced make_sys_image to use the new gzip and the image is 600MB. When this is copied to the new HFS lvol it remains 600MB. I then did a
dd if=/dev/vgxx/rvolx of=/var/tmp/image_hfs bs=1024k

and this plus the lif header wrapper produces the 2.1Gb image.

I've noticed from the make_medialif man pages that the example uses 1024k bs for a 250MB image. Seeing as my original image is double this size do you think a bs of 2048k would possibly solve the problem?

Thanks again

[marc seguin]

Is your file /var/tmp/image_hfs so big after dd command, or only after doing the make_medialif command ?

In the first case (dd), what is the size of your hfs lvol ? 2.1 GB ?
The dd command dump the whole lvol, and so create a very large file.
So you have to create a lvol smaller than the maximum size of your CD (remember your image will be larger after adding LIF files).

[Mark Duffy]

Thanks for all you replies so far.

I've run the whole process again and it's only after the dd that the image becomes over 2GB. The LIF header image is 33MB.

Why is the dd turning a 600MB image into 2GB??

Thanks again,

Mark

[Patrick Wallek · Accepted solution]

Mark,

How big is the HFS LVOL that you are copying this too? As has been said before, if the LVOL that you are doing the dd from is set up to be 2 GB the the output of your dd command is going to be 2 GB as well. The dd reads the whole logical volume, including all the empty parts, not just the data. dd doesn't care how much data is there. Changing the block size in the dd command probably won't make any difference.

Your best bet is to create a LVOL that is about 600 MB in size and copy your stuff to that. Then do the dd from that LVOL. That should keep the size down to an amount that will fit on a CD.

[Wodisch]

Hello Mark,
from what I read - could it be you have a 600MB file
system in a 2.1GB LVol??? Then you must add something
like "count=600" to your "dd" command line.
HTH,
Wodisch

[Mark Duffy]

Thanks all. It was the lvol size that was causing the problem.

Carlos, apologies but I did not realise first time that this is what you were saying and so did not assign full points. If I could change the points I would but I don't appear to be able to do so. Thanks for you help, much appreciated.

Mark

[Carlos Fernandez Riera]

Mark: Dont worry.
The best important is your problem is corrected, with help of one or many forumers.

Be happy.