Red Hat EL 4 WS - imaging to a 3rd "partition"

[araczek]

Hi,

We have a development environment where developer workstations are multi-boot systems booting XP/Vista using a third party boot manager
called System Commander. The developers have a need to use Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 WS. So what I want to do is resize the 2 windows partitions and squeeze in RH on the end. I tried Acronis and I am not really sure how to restore the partitions as there are 3 to restore and I am not sure how the partitions will act when restored.

Also tried ghost, can't restore multiple part. with the version I had
(. On to Clonezilla. I can backup up and restore to a disk FINE. But I can't seem to get the restoreparts option to work. I am not sure what options to use. Default does not work and only restores the boot. I am sure I am doing something wrong.

Now trying g4l but it is a sector by sector copy. Takes forever and restores the same exact config.

Does anyone have a suggestion on what to use, how to do this? Ultimately I just want to take the linux image (which amounts to 3
partitions of its own) and place it on the last partition. System Commander has the option to hide OS's from each other, which is what I do.

What to do?????????

[Rubberman]

You might want to check out gparted at www.gparted.org. It should do pretty much what you want. You shouldn't have a problem with your XP/Vista partitions running properly, though it is in the realm of possibility that some bonheaded application could use absolute disc location information as part of their copy protection scheme. This used to be more common back in the days of DOS.

[araczek]

Sorry, tried and don't see how to use gparted to do this. Again, I am a Linux "newbie" but been a Windows admin for 14 years. I really am not sure how to restore the partitions. I have tried clonezilla and g4l and it only seems to restore the boot partition. I just can't get these tools to work right. This only happens when trying to restore partitions, I can restore an entire drive fine but trying to restore to a 2nd or third partition or "unallocated space" it only restores real quick which tells me it is only doing the boot part.

I realize I probably need to modify the fstab file (am I right?) if I install to another partition. Have to mod anything else?

Anyone have idea's on what tool(s) to use and how I can accomplish this? If you have an idea please let me know how to use the tool.

[Rubberman]

Ok. Your system(s) has 2 Windows partitions (NTFS or FAT32?), and a 3rd partition with Linux, but that is an extended partition probably because Linux normally creates 3 partitions of its own: /boot (first partition), swap (2nd partition), and / (3rd partition). Is that the case, that your Linux installation is in an extended partition?

[devils casper]

Lets check partition structure of Harddisk first. Post the output of fdisk -l command here.

su -
fdisk -l

* Its small L in fdisk -l.

[araczek]

Rubberman-

Well I realized late I was hitting the 4 partition barrier. So I am trying to figure out how to restore this thing. Can I restore those partitions to a logical? I am not married to any boot manager or solution as long as I can have a multiboot system by RESTORING stock images (XP, Vista, sometimes SERVER 2003) with minimal hassle. In present systems being used I will need to shrink a partition to create unallocated space for Linux. In the XP Vista scenario I was thinking of having Linux first and let grub handle the booting but I am not sure grub will pick up the other OS's from an imaged partition. Then I was thinking of having Linux always be the 2nd "partition" and let System Commander handle the boot.
Problem always comes back to how do I restore the partitions? Clonezilla always fails and tells me image is corrupt, g4L (when restoring parts) looks like it does something but it goes too fast an I think it only restores boot.
1. Can I restore BOOT, ROOT and SWAP parts to a logical?
2. How do I use the linux imaging tools?
3. Can I get away with just a ROOT and SWAP partition?

Main problem is restoring and how to use the tools to get what I need.

[devils casper]

There is no need to /boot partition unless you are using LVM and have mission critical system.

I would suggest you to post output of fdisk -l command here.

There are a lot of tools available to create/restore partitions. I am using PartImage for a long time and it works pretty well.

[Rubberman]

Linux and Windows both handle extended partitions ok. You should be able to create extended partitions, and then mount those and access/backup/restore them like any other, though I haven't done that myself. You will want to use grub as a boot loader though, since while grub/linux will boot from an extended partition, Windows won't. It (Windows) only supports use of extended partitions for data, not booting, so you cannot put your C drive on one.

[araczek]

First thank you all for replying. Much appreciated as I need the help.

Note the RHEL image I have was built on the PC's I intend to restotore images to and was built with RH being the only OS.

fdisk -l
Device Boot Start End Blocks ID System
/dev/sda1 * 1 13 104391 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 14 4355 27647865 83 Linux
/dev/sda3 3456 3710 2048287 82 Linux swap

So I assume if RH is anyplace other than first I will need to do some editing? The
System Commander boot manager has the ability to hide OS's from each other and I was hoping to fool Liux into thinking it is first on the disk.

Thank you.

[Rubberman]

I really don't think you need to worry about it. When Linux boots, it organizes /dev/sd* as it sees fit. I don't think you can "fool" it into thinking that /dev/sda4.1 (or whatever) is /dev/sda1.