Partitioning demystified and help cloning system

[sisyphus1978]

Hi.

Hope you fine folk can help. I have successfully set up a clonezilla pxe machine, and I've been using it for a couple of months. The machine itself has two HDD. Fdisk -l gives this:


Disk /dev/sda: 122.9 GB, 122942324736 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14946 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xd435d435

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 14916 119812738+ 8e Linux LVM
/dev/sda2 14917 14946 240975 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 14917 14946 240943+ 83 Linux

Disk /dev/sdb: 120.0 GB, 120034123776 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14593 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x5f6e52d2

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 1 14593 117218241 83 Linux
First question. Have I set this up incorrectly? All I want the machine for is to backup and store/restore the clonezilla images I have created.

Second question. I want to clone the first HDD to the second, so that if the first dies, I can swap it in (and I don't have to set it up again). I was going to DD the first to the second, but the partitioning of the first HDD is confusing me.

Any help gratefully received.

[stlsaint]

are you asking for raid1 setup or simple cloning. Repos should have a few options for cloning. not at my rig now so i cant check. but do check repos before going off archive.

[sisyphus1978]

What I am asking is actually very simple (probably). I thought I had two 120gb drives. I was going to DD clone the one that is set up as a clonezilla machine (it already works great) onto the other HDD, so that if the 1st one dies, I have a backup (and don't have to set it all up again). Then I looked at the fdisk info and didn't really get what I had done to it. I hoped somebody could explain.

[stlsaint]

see here (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=135172).

please mark thread as solved if this is what you need.

[Penguin Guy]

Have I set this up incorrectly?
You've put one of your /dev/sda partitions inside an extended partition; this has no negative effect but does make things a little more confusing. You should also consider using RAID (http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=RAID) rather than simply copying the partition.

I can't help you any further with the partitioning unless you can tell me which partition clonezilla is on.


Disk /dev/sda: 122.9 GB
Most HDDs have a whole number of gigabytes. Be suspicious.

[sisyphus1978]

stlsaint: Thanks for the link.

Penguin Guy: Okay, that's helpful. I feel like I'm almost understanding it.

So I've attached a screendump from Gparted. I think clonezilla and ubuntu are on sda5, which, if I'm right, means that sda1 is not even being used.
I guess what I want is to mount sda1 so that the clonezilla images can reside on that part of the disk too.

So. Can I grow sda2 (sda5) into sda 1. Or am I better off cloning sda5 onto the other disk and then copying back?

I am beginning to love linux. Slowly.

[sisyphus1978]

I'm providing some more details about the various disks/partitions. If somebody could help shine a light on all this, I'd be very grateful.

Recap: I essentially want sda and sdb to be identical copies. I would like full capacity of both drives to be accessible to the clonezilla partition.
----------------------------

/dev/mapper/ubuntu-root (113.01 GiB)
/dev/mapper/ubuntu-swap_1 (1.24 GiB)
/dev/sda (114.49 GiB)
/dev/sdb (111.79 GiB)

[sisyphus1978]

Can anyone tell me if deleting sda1 will result in me losing data?

[sisyphus1978]

...

[sisyphus1978]

Okay. This is still confusing me. Here's my fstab:


# Entry for /dev/mapper/ubuntu-root :
UUID=8aaaade5-3b89-482f-9ad7-a32cb1c40016 / ext3 relatime,errors=remount-ro 0 1
# Entry for /dev/sda5 :
UUID=20ab1fa3-bebf-4153-b44f-aacf15320cb9 /boot ext2 relatime 0 2
# Entry for /dev/mapper/ubuntu-swap_1 :
UUID=f4dd9d3a-87f5-4c83-8045-40270d052219 none swap sw 0 0
# Entry for /dev/sdb1 :
UUID=e917ce08-8524-4cb1-99a9-758d23c8ce7c /media/store ext2 defaults 0 0
And. If you check out the screen-dump, what the heck is sdc1?

Like I say, I am flummoxed. I would like to get it sorted without destroying any functionality...

[sisyphus1978]

...

[sisyphus1978]

...

[sisyphus1978]

...

[sisyphus1978]

Please somebody explain the partitioning to me. You can give a man a fish. He eats for a day. Explain how to fish. He never comes back to annoy you (but drowns in a fishing accident).

[sisyphus1978]

I just booted up a live-cd. I can mount a 245.7MB disk which shows grub etc. However I used it this morning and I know it has some clonezilla imgs on it (40 gig at least).

Please can somebody who understands explain what is going on. Please.

[sisyphus1978]

How do I get some help around here?

[sisyphus1978]

Am I in the wrong forum or what?