I found this article on a google search. It is a copy of the cached page from desktop-linux.net. It did not exist on the site anymore, so I posted it here.

Also has an article on NVidia drivers.

Make sure you check your BIOS settings!

Installing And Tweaking a nVidia Card

Cheers…

Backing Up Linux With Ghost

The version of Ghost I use is Ghost 2001, the current version is 2002. I don’t recommend buying Ghost to use with Linux but if you already have a copy you may want to play around with it. There is no Linux version so you’ll need to use a machine running Windows to create the Ghost disks. To do the following you must have a CDRW drive or a FAT partition to write the Ghost image file (.gho) to, you can also use Ghost to clone the contents of one drive to another. Symantec does not make a Linux version so you must use Windows to create the Ghost boot disk needed to run Ghost.

Update, I recently reformatted my linux root partition making it larger and decided to go with the ext3 file system instead of reiserfs which is what I was using when I first wrote this page. Although ext3 is a journalizing file system and is better than ext2, I do not recommend using ext3. I can’t give you any technical insight but I had problems with Ghost backups of ext3 partitions. I switched back to Reiserfs and resized the partition from 2Gb to 10GB and Ghost had problems. Ghost does not understand or compress Linux file systems well, if you have a 10Gb partition containing 1GB of used space, Ghost will mistakenly think that all 10Gb is used and mis report the length of time it will take to create the image and the image size. I’ve had problems being unable to backup large partitions.

Partition To Image

Insert the Ghost boot floppy and reboot. Once Ghost is running, from the menu choose “local - Partition to Image”, go to your Linux partions and backup each one individually to a CDRW or a FAT partition. Take your time reading the options, ghost can be confusing at first.

I usually name each copy with a name that corresponds to the partition I am copying. Ghost sees each partition as a number that corresponds to the initial Windows partition which is “1″. This means your first Linux partition “hda5″ (swap in my case) becomes “2″ in Ghost’s eyes. So my hda6 partition which is root was seen by ghost to be partition “3″ and was 4098MB in size so I named it “3-root-4098.GHO”.

Ghost gives you the option of “No Compression”, “Fast Compression”, and “High Compression”. My reiserfs root partition was about 1Gb of used space and I chose “High Compression”, the resulting image file weighed in at a suprising 1.3Gb, backup time was about 15 minutes.

Writing An Image To Disk:

I have a dual boot Linux-Win98 drive and also a slave drive formatted with Fat32 so that I can store files, documents, .mp3’s etc… that are available to both OS’s so if you have a Fat32 formatted drive you can write the image to it.

Writing An Image To A CDRW:

With Ghost you can write an image directly to a CDRW drive, Ghost supports spanning the image to multiple CD’s or files. Ghost reported that it would take about 6 CDR’s, which is misleading. Ghost saw that my reiserfs partition was over 4GB and assumed that all of this was used space. As I said earlier, only about 1GB was actually used, the image file with High Compression was about 1.3GB in size and used only 2 CDR’s. The total backup time was 51 minutes.

Disk To Disk Cloning

Note: Before getting started, make sure you have a working Linux boot disk.

My relatively new 20GB hard drive has been ocasionally making a metalic screeching sound and Smart Drive confirmed what my ears were telling me, “Disk status bad, backup data and replace drive”. So off to the store I went and purchased a new 40GB drive, brought it home, slaved it to the old drive, booted from the Ghost boot disk.

Once Ghost came up I went into options and selected “Boot Image”, this tells ghost to copy the boot sector as well as all data on the drive. Next I left the options menu and chose “Local - Disk to Disk” clone. When confronted with the “new drive” screen I saw that Ghost had resized some of my partitions, this can be a handy feature when going from a smaller drive to a larger drive or visa versa, but if you let Ghost resize your partitions you’ll get geometry error’s and won’t be able to boot into Linux easily. I reset the partitions to there original sizes and proceeded to clone the old drive. When Ghost was done I rebooted into Linux for the first time I got a “99 99 99 99 99….” error message. This is where you’ll need that Linux boot disk. Just boot up with the disk and type lilo at the command prompt, remove the disk and reboot. You should be ready to go. If using Mandrake you can boot from the installation cdrom, hit the F1 key and type rescue, then choose to reinstall lilo.

Restoring An Image

Note: Before getting started, make sure you have a working Linux boot disk.

Once you have decided its time to reinstall your ghosted Linux partition(s), just start up the ghost program from the floppy, reinstall each partition individually by choosing “local - Partition from Image “. Each partition will be completely overwritten and you will be brought back to the pristine Linux system that you backed up. Worked great for me though when I tried to boot into Linux for the first time I got a “99 99 99 99 99….” error message. This is where you’ll need that Linux boot disk. Just boot up with the disk and type lilo at the command prompt, remove the disk and reboot. You should be ready to go. If using Mandrake you can boot from the installation cdrom, hit the F1 key and type rescue, then choose to reinstall lilo.

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