copying system onto bootable CF card

[aubuti]

I have seen pieces of what I need addressed in various threads, but nothing that puts them all together. Any help on this will be much appreciated.

I am running 8.10 desktop on an MSI Wind desktop. Everything is on the single 500GB hard drive. I also have a 4GB CompactFlash card in the system that has a working version of 8.04 desktop on it. I would like remove 8.04 from the CF card and copy/clone the currently configured 8.10 onto it as a backup just in case I accidentally trash the 8.10 installation on the HDD some time. I'd also like to be able to update the CF backup easily periodically to keep it current with the setup running off the HDD.

The HDD is partitioned as follows.



ken@pinot:~$ df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb2 9843308 800448 8542840 9% /
tmpfs 1032220 0 1032220 0% /lib/init/rw
varrun 1032220 376 1031844 1% /var/run
varlock 1032220 0 1032220 0% /var/lock
udev 1032220 2740 1029480 1% /dev
tmpfs 1032220 12 1032208 1% /dev/shm
lrm 1032220 2204 1030016 1% /lib/modules/2.6.27-16-generic/volatile
/dev/sdb1 980308 129180 801332 14% /boot
/dev/sdb10 403718328 179072156 204138400 47% /data
/dev/sdb6 14263188 4954448 8584212 37% /home
/dev/sdb9 4917648 141860 4525980 4% /tmp
/dev/sdb7 19686804 2619360 16067400 15% /usr
/dev/sdb8 4917648 678512 3989328 15% /var

Command line is not a problem, so if the solution involves 'dd' or other command line tool that is fine with me. I've seen lots of dd examples for copying /dev/sdb to /dev/sda , but I only want to copy the filesystems necessary to boot from the CF. The /data and /home fs are regularly backed up offsite and don't need to go onto the CF, and wouldn't fit anyway.

I hope this is clear, and thanks in advance.

-K

[lemming465]

If you really want an alternate boot device, you'll need to get the contents of /, /boot, /usr, and /var onto the CF. I don't think it will fit in 4 GB, so you'd need a bigger CF card. Also, you'd have to fiddle with /etc/fstab to correct the partitions and devices or UUID's to match the CF device.

Once you were set up, the simplest way to keep it updated would be using rsync.

[aubuti]

Thanks for the reply. Actually Hardy fit on the 4GB just fine. So I decided to do a distribution upgrade to 8.10, and had to remove some larger packages that I don't use on this computer anyway, as I use it mostly as a Squeezebox audio server. After that Intrepid installed fine as well. I still need to tinker with the filesystems a bit, as I had originally configured /var and /tmp to write to a tmpfs to avoid wearing out the CF with repeated writes to logs and such.

Keeping it updated with the main (HDD) system via rsync is a good suggestion that I had overlooked. Thanks.