resize and backup partitions?

[Henrik W Lund]

Ara at Avvali.COM wrote:

>Hi
>Do I have to have system running or can i do it from livecd too? Because
>I guess system has to be offline for recovering from an image which was
>built
>Thank you
>  
>
I imagine it would work from the livecd too (not knowing, though, having 
never used it). This is, of course, provided you can access the image 
you built previously.

The easiest thing, of course, would be to have an extra harddisk and 
dump(8) all of your filesystems to it. Then, fdisk(8) to your hearts 
content on the first drive, boot the livecd, mount the second hard drive 
(with your images on) somewhere and restore(8).

If you have only one hard drive, where did you put your images? Did you 
burn them to cd? If so, all is well and good if you have two CD readers. 
If you have only one, you may or may not be in trouble, I don't know if 
the livecd allows for unmounting of itself.

And as for restore(8)ing to a running system, I don't know if you can. I 
do suppose stuff like /usr can be restore(8)d without too much fuss, but 
as for /, /var and /tmp, I don't know (this is all assuming you used the 
default layout during installation. Your mount points may, obviously, 
differ). Maybe someone more experienced can elaborate on this?

-Henrik W Lund

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