shanenin

I see why you reccomended using the -c option, you would need it to write to standard output. None-the-less, it did not seem to work. I mean using cfdisk or fdisk, it does not show a partition table. I need a reliable way to backup customers harddrives before performing possibly risky procedures, I thought maybe dd would be a possible way to go. I think I will purchase a copy of ghost. Becasue ghost uses activation, I am not sure if that will be a problem.

Thank you for clarifying that, you are definately correct. I think I was confused by the way grub names its hard drives hd0 -first harddrive hd1 -second harddrive hd2 - third harddrive that made me think incorrectly the following was also true: ide0 -first device ide1 -second device ide2 -third devide

I think your ide devices are labled like this: ide0 master /dev/hda -first ide1 slave /dev/hdb -second ide2 master /dev/hdc -third ide3 slave /dev/hdd -fourth I guess I am not sure. I may be lableing them wrong, I assumbed the master and slave were two seperate ide devices. Maybe someone else can jump in and clarify :-) that is my boot partition, you may or may not have one. the boot partition contains both my kernel and grub files. It is not nessesary to have a seperate partition for your /boot directory.

thanks for the suggestions, I will try those tommarrow.

I just made a 14gb gzipped file like this dd if=/dev/hda conv=sync,noerror bs=64 | gzip -c > /mnt/backup/windows.gz I then deleted all of my partitions from /dev/hda(where windows resided), now I am seeing if I can recreate my system doing the reverse. I am guessing this will take a couple hours gzip -d /mnt/backup/windows.gz | dd of=/dev/hda conv=sync,noerror bs=64 this is just my play system, so if I screw something up it does not matter. assumbing this works. could this be done with a 100gb system? the single file that would create would be huge. edit add later// I think my above comm

it seemed to work alright. I set my bios to boot from the second drive, /dev/hdb, and it did without any problems.

I am in the middle of ghosting my windows drive. I used this command. I read using a 64 byte blocksize was more efficient dd if=/dev/hda conv=sync,noerror of=/dev/hdb bs=64 it has been running for about one half hour, do you see any flaws in this method?

what you are doing looks like it should work. I have never used the fedora disks in that fashion. If you would like to learn a universal way that would work with any distro. I will show you. You will need to use a live linux cd like knoppix, or any of the others available. First you will need to boot your knoppix cd. Then open up a shell and change to the user root with the su command. You will then need to figure out where your root(main) linux partition is located. /dev/hda is your first ide(primary) drive, /dev/hdb is your second ide(slave) drive. You will use the fdisk command to print out

your welcome :-)

thanks for the nice explanation :-)

I always get bit and bytes mixed up, that is 8 times more ones and zeros then I was thinking.

congrats on getting you dial up modem to work :-) you could try the program guarddog, it is easy to set up. I have used that in the past, it should give you full stealth mode.

if one block contains 512 bytes, that seems small to contain all of the info: the partition table. and grub info edit added later// I am assumbing 512 bytes means 512 1s or 0s

if I wanted to try and fix my mbr(partition table), would that have been a pretty involved process? If I did not have a backup, I may have tried to do that. edit added later// I have not been able to find this with a quick google. is the mbr exactly 512 bytes? bs=512 count=1 is that the exact size of my mbr?

it sounds like the drive may be the problem. Do you have any usb devices, if so unplug them; usb devices have been know to cause some install problems. Because you say it stalls at different points, that leads me to believe it is not a usb problem(try unpluging them anyways).

does that mean by just zeroing the mbr, I am clearing out all of my partitions?

Yup. I am pretty sure it will knock out all of the partitions, at least it has in practice. In the script I used above, I use that to wipe the whole drive clean, then parted is able to set up new partitions. If it was only clearing away the mbr parted would not work. edit added later// count=1 does that mean it will do one block? what you guys are saying, seems correct, but... In practice, I always rember this command wiping the whole drive.

I am pretty sure it does the whole drive, including the mbr. I made a gentoo cd with a tarball and this script to automate installing freevo as standalone divx players #!/bin/bash echo "this script will erase and partition your full drive" echo "enter 'yes' and return to continue" read answer if [ ${answer} != "yes" ]; then exit; fi echo "the script will now partition your drive" sleep 3 dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1 && parted -s /dev/hda mklabel msdos && parted -s /dev/hda mkpart primary ext2 0.0 200.0 && parted -s /dev/hda mkpart primary linux-swap 200.

That is the area I would like to learn some more. I will have my domain, brighteyedcomputer.com listed in the yellow pages, so I will need to have a simple webpage up by Febraury(when it is published). I have not yet decided on making my own webserver, or paying a few dollars a month to have it hosted. I think I would really enjoy setting up my own webserver, a project is the best way to learn. Two negatives of using my cable service to serve the sight. the first would be, I am not sure if port 80 is blocked. The second reason is security. If I am running a web server, I think my home network

I had a corrupted partition table on my portable usb dirve. I decided I would try and zero it out using this command dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1 I happen to have it plugged into my linux standalone freevo box, this contained about 150 gbs of media. I was controling the computer remotely from my main workstation. Here is where things went wrong. I used this command dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1 just one letter different, I managed to corrupt my main harddrive instead of the portable drive. All is not lost, I have a second standalne box connected to our bedroom tv

I have been using the default grey background for a long time, but I found some wall paper I liked. below is my linux system running gnome

I found this simple solution shutdown -c

'S' must refer to scripts?

the call to 'ps' was my inspiration to write the plugin :-) I also did think it was kind of "silly" way to do it. As to using the freevo API I need to find some docs. I probably might find something on their wiki. As of now this is the only doc I have used, or seen http://freevo.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/doc/DevelopPlugins Thanks for all of your suggestions :-)

I have a very simple plugin I wrote for freevo. below is the plugin. it will shutdown your computer after your avi file has finished playing, kind of like a sleep timer. #!/usr/bin/env python import os import time import commands import thread import plugin from gui.PopupBox import PopupBox from gui.ConfirmBox import ConfirmBox class PluginInterface(plugin.ItemPlugin): """ this plugin will power down your system using the command "shutdown -h now" after your avi file has finished. you can enable it by adding this to your local conf file plugin.activate('video.autoshutdown') """ def