On 08/08 08:15 , Tim Underwood wrote:
> > > dramatically, and I'm wondering what it takes to transfer a working 
> > > image from the PCMCIA hard drive to the CF card.
> > >
> > > Anyone done this sort of thing before?

many times. 

> >   I have not done this directly, but I think it should work: 
> > fdisk, disklabel, and newfs, mount and cd to the new card 
> > then use this command: tar cplf - / | tar xpf -

or if you don't have a machine which can take multiple pcmcia devices; just
put a netcat in the middle of that pipe, and move the system over the
network. 

> >   This assumes you have one file system.  

if you don't have one filesystem; just create the necessary partitions and
directories to mount them on your target root partition. tar will happily
use those directories when it unpacks the transferred files onto the target
system.

> I've done this with Linux before, and even changing /etc/fstab, it was
> definitely not happy, and I wound up having to re-install.  Since I have
> to do so much juggling (at this time) to get software on the system, if
> I can I'd rather copy it than re-install.

I've been using the same OS install on my laptop (Debian Linux) for about 3
years now. It's been through 3 different laptops, and 4 or 5 different hard
drives, and never reinstalled. I just transfer it from one HDD to another;
sometimes across the network. haven't had any real problems with it.

that doesn't count the number of times I've taken a running server off a
dying HDD and put it on a good drive or drive array, suffering only an hour
or two of downtime, and losing little/no data.

so it definitely can be done. what sort of specific problems did you run
into when you tried it?

-- 
Carl Soderstrom
Systems Administrator
Real-Time Enterprises
www.real-time.com