moving a disk

[PJ]

Roland Smith wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 24, 2009 at 02:33:25PM -0400, PJ wrote:
>   
>> I'm afraid I was a bit impatient 
>>     
>
> Patience is a virtue. Installing stuff can take hours, and a split-second can
> suffice to screw it all up. Been there & done that. :-)
>
>   
>> and messed up the already messed up
>> disk... frankly, I don't recall whatever happened to the thing in the
>> first place.
>>     
>
> Can I give you a tip? If you are doing something new or hairy, keep a laptop
> or even a paper notebook handy and make notes of what you do. Write down the
> commands that you use and any error messages that you get.
>
> My favorite technique is to open emacs (preferably on another machine), start
> a terminal/ssh session inside an emacs buffer and then do my thing. This gives
> me a complete record of what I've done. Save these session (with some added
> explanations) to a file and you'll know what to do next time, or at least you
> can explain to others what you've been doing.
>
>   
>> anyway, I'm just practicing another minimal install... it's not as bad as I
>> had thought... I'm getting it all together now.  
>>     
>
> There is an extremely easy way to get all ports that you need onto a new
> machine, provided that you have a (base) machine of (a) the same FreeBSD major
> version of (b) the same hardware architecture and (c) up-to-date installed
> ports available.
>
> On the base machine, make dump(8)s of the filesystem(s) containing /usr/local,
> /var/db/ports and /var/db/pkg and save them to files. Transfer those dump
> files to an external harddisk or DVD. Using restore(8) interactively on the
> new machine, restore these three directories to their respective filesystems
> and you've got all ports up and running save for some editing of /etc/rc.conf.
>
>   
I'm not that organized, yet... ;-)  but I have saved my rc.conf,
smb.conf, httpd.conf. httpd-vhosts.conf 7 a number of other handy
configuration files that I copy to new installations and tweak, if
necessary; even the certificates for ssl work fine... so, now I think
I'll follow your suggestion and keep a record and do the copy stuff - it
also saves bandwidth so you don'
t have to download all the distfiles... but I don't do any hairy stuff
:-(  just trying to K.I.S.S - and this will make it even simpler.
Thanks again... learned again...
>> Thanks much, I'm beginning
>> to understand a bit more... this boot stuff sure is complicated...
>>     
>
> Yep. PC booting is a throwback to an earlier era when 640 kB RAM was all there
> was and 512 bytes seemed big enough for boot code, because you were writing in
> machine language or assembly anyway.
>
> If you want a real hair-raising story about the time that assemblers were
> luxuries, google 'the story of Mel' and be amazed (or horrified). It predates
> PCs, but I think it shows the mind-set of the begin time of (personal)
> computing.
>
> Roland
>