help needed using Remastersys

[Uncle Bob]

A bit of background first. My mint laptop is actually provided to me by my employer. Seeing as I'm hardly ever in the office I have wiped my "corporate" XP build and whacked mint on instead. (I did not bother with dual-boot; just reformatted the whole hdd) However, time has caught up with me and I have to say farewell to my laptop. My employer and Dell are in bed together so naturally all our current hardware gets upgraded/replaced with Dell machines and they have now cornered me to give me my new Dell (unknown model at this moment) and take back by beloved HP Compaq NC6000

Now, I have spent a lot of time and efford to get my mint machine the way I like it (of sorts) and I don't want to do the same with the replacement Dell and this is where Remastersys comes into play.

I have a LAN Storage drive of 500GB (same as a portable USB hard drive, but with a RJ45 network port) that I use as my home network dumping ground. Naturally, this is where I want to place my mint image so I can then place it on a DVD using my main PC. This is where I'm stuck.

My intention is to make an image of my current mint laptop, place it on my network file store, burn it to disc, then when i get the new lappy, repartition the hdd, making it dual boot and place my mint image on it.

...and away I go, having not loose any configurations, settings or anything else and its all on the new laptop!

Please help me out with step-by-step commands I'm supposed to use to get this done. Alternatively, if it cannot be done to and external drive, then just anyware on the current laptop would be fine, then i can just use nautilus afterwards to cut/paste the image to the external drive.

Hope I've provided enough info, else just let me know what else I need to provide. I'm aware that the display drivers might be a problem as my current machine uses ATI and Dell usually uses Nvidia. I do know that the dell laptop I'm getting issued with this week is one of those flashy/suave widescreen models, but that's all i know for sure about it.

[Fragadelic]

The command you would use is:

sudo remastersys backup

This will create an iso for you to burn or copy,etc.

To install this back again, you simply put it in and run the livecd. Start the install to hard drive and when prompted to setup a user, use the existing one you did when you were using mint. After install, this will give you a usable system like the one you currently have and it will use the nv driver from Xorg so you can then use envy to install the nvidia proprietary driver if you need 3d.

[Uncle Bob]

Fragadelic, just to reiterate what I have said on another thread - You da MAN! I thought is was the backup option, but I wasn't too sure. I Found out today the new laptop I'm getting is a Dell Latitude D620, so guess what I'll be doing pretty soon with it...

[Fragadelic]

Enjoy the new laptop!

[Uncle Bob]

A bit concerned; first of all I got a message that it could not open my file store and that it's skipping. That's OK and understandable. However it has now been stuck midway through the 120MB level for about 30 minutes.

How long on average should this process take, or should I just leave it running overnight?

Currently I'm not using that machine at all. I'm posting this reply from another machine.

[Fragadelic]

Do you have any Virtual Box drives on your partition?

If you do, removing them will help.

Typically if it seems to hang at a certain part like that, it has always been when I forgot to remove virtual drives.

[donlinux]

Don't know if I did this correctly or not, but it appears as if remastersys is stuck in an endless loop.

I don't have any virtual drives installed. I ran sudo remastersys backup and got a few error messages about network shares even though I had unmounted them. Then it said looks like we have everything we need and started to make an iso. The cursor was moving fairly slowly as the mb's added up. Now the cursor in my terminal is flying across and the mb's scroll past faster than I can see. This has been going on for about 3 hours now. Should I assume there's a problem or is this normal? Right now it seems to start at 0 mb and run up to 4080 mb and then start again.

Thanks,

[Fragadelic]

That is definitely an issue.

How much data do you have on the partition?

can you post the output of "df -sh"

[donlinux]

Hi,

Thanks for the quick reply. df -sh gets me an error message, invalid option -s
However a regular df -h gives us this:

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda1 72G 14G 56G 20% /
varrun 252M 100K 252M 1% /var/run
varlock 252M 0 252M 0% /var/lock
procbususb 10M 88K 10M 1% /proc/bus/usb
udev 10M 88K 10M 1% /dev
devshm 252M 0 252M 0% /dev/shm
lrm 252M 18M 235M 7% /lib/modules/2.6.17-11-generic/volatile
fusesmb 72G 14G 56G 20% /home/donlinux/Network

Don't know if this will help you in diagnostics but I sure hope so.

Off to work now, so I'll check back later today.

Many thanks for your help thus far.

[Fragadelic]

14 Gig used on your root partition. Do you have an iso files there?

Large compressed files will be a problem.

If you don't have any large compressed files and that 14G is all data, then I'm not quite sure squashfs will work as the resulting file will be way too large.

What I've found is that squashfs has trouble with squashfs files over 2Gig when trying to add the extra files needed in the second part of the squashing.

I emailed the author of squashfs-tools and he never responded back to me so I can't say for sure whether that will be corrected.

[donlinux]

ok, after looking at my partions using G-parted, I find that it appears as if I really only have one giant partition. My setup is as follows:

/dev/hda1 - ext3 - /,/dev/static/dev - 73.10GB
/dev/hda2 - Extended - 1.4GB
/dev/hda5 - linux swap - 1.4 GB

On installation, I told the installer to erase and use all free space. My question now is this. Do I need to re-partition and move my /home folder to a separate partition? and, if so, can I do it using g-parted without totally screwing up my configuration? Please bear in mind that I am still considered a newbie, but can say that I'm having a lot of fun.

Thanks again !

[Fragadelic]

You don't have to make a separate /home partition. You just have to trim down how much is on your / partition so the compressed filesystem isn't too large.