Mondo-Rescue Help...

[mrhodes]

Hello,
Using the advice of some people from these forums I installed mondo so I could backup my working gentoo system, however when I tried to run it I got this error...

Mindi --makemountlist failed for some reason. Bad fstab file?
Failed.
---FATALERROR--- Failed to pre-param initialize

This came right after the sanity check...

Anyone else have this problem?

Thanks,

Mike

[Seth]

[mrhodes]

I wasn't using any options. On the mondo website it says that when you run mondoarchice, a menu type program should run, and you can do everything from it.

http://www.nakedsoul.org/~troff/manual/On_Line_Dummy_Guide.html

I'm just going from this site here... but, like I said, crashes at the fstab file....


Here is my fstab file....

[Seth]

Hmm. I was unaware of the menu options. Which version of mondo-rescue are you using?

Also, your fstab looks o.k. to me, that is as long as the uncommented word "no" is just an artifact of the forum software and not how things look in your file.

Try running a backup using some of the command line options. I found mondo gave me pretty good error messages when I did.

One very stupid question, but it has to be asked: You're running mondo as root, aren't you?

Seth

[mrhodes]

yup, I am running it as root....

I'm not too sure how to use the command options, but I shouldn't have a lot of trouble figuring it out...

I'll try the command listed above

I'm using version 1.61 I beleive.. and mindi 0.81 I think as well...the latest avail in the portage tree

I have to head out to work now, but I'll give this more of a try tonight.... thanks for the help

Mike

[mrhodes]

Hmmmm tried mondoarchive from the command line, and I'm still getting the error

This is what I see...

[Seth]

It's a long shot, but try commenting out the line in fstab for your cdrom drive.

The reason I suggest this is that when I first emerged Mondo, it was version 1.4 something and I got a lot nasty messages about my fstab file too. Commenting out the cdrom drive lines provided a bad fix. So, on the advice of Mondo's maintainer, I installed a snapshot and after that everything worked fine.

My versions are mindi-1.81_20030113 and mondo-1.61_20030113 and may not be in portage yet.

Hope this helps,

Seth

[mrhodes]

Nope, that didn't work

All I want to to make a CD image of my computer so I don't have to spend a day installing this again!

I wish mondo would work... I just did a fresh install of gentoo, so I don't think there should be anything wrong...

Anyway, if anyone can think of anything else that would be great...
I think I might look into other programs like partimage. Has anyone used this before? Did it work well?

Thanks,

Mike

[mrhodes]

Hey, Just wanted to update you guys on my progress....

I emerged partimage and gave that a try.
I went off the instuctions I found on the partimage site, and managed to make a couple image files of my root, and boot partitions. Then made an iso and burned it to cd.

everything worked well up to this point, so I was quite happy ...

rebooted the computer off the new CD, and ran partimage to restore my partitions. The boot partition restored without error, but when I tried to restore the root partition, it stopped at 50% ! I don't know why... So, I rebooted the computer, without the boot cd... Linux came up, and I got to the login prompt, however, there were some permision errors with the DHCPd, and webmin servers... Something didn't seem right, so I decided to try to restore everything again, but this time I used my 52x drive from my main computer (was using a 2x burner in the server).

the faster drive worked great, and got past 50% in the restore... now everything works fine

Oh, I had to boot from the Gentoo LiveCD and chroot to the server to re install grub.... but that was painless..

Other then that, I recommend partimage for sure... works nice..

Sorry for the long post, just wanted to let you guys know that I'm back in business again

Mike

[Decibels]

Yes, Partition Image is much better than Mondo. I have been playing with both and except for hdparm not working on the bootcd from PartImage (edited the ISO and put hdparm, less and nano in there later. Works Great), it all with smooth. Recovered to a test partition(s) twice and works great!

I would recommend this over mondo for anybody!

[Decibels]

Still going to keep Partimage around, but going to look at Mondo again. Think they have done some more work on it.

The issue I ran into with Partimage is that image got corrupted. If checksum (magic string) doesn't match with the first image, Partimage will just quit. It would do my first cd and quit on the second. Infact it was the first image that was corrupted, not the second. Unfortunetly this was a time I actually needed a backup.

Always run simulation mode on the backup you make, never trust the image until you test it. Learned from experience.
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[mlybarger]

i'll keep the old mondo-arvhive thread going good. i've been running the backups daily, over writing old ones, and sometimes swapping out the cdrw disk. i go to verify the disk, and i can't get mondo to verify the cd image. here's the commands i've used:

mondoarvhive -Vc 16
- per manpage. this one doesn't do anything. just stops and says i should check out some log file that is incomprehensible.

mondoarvhive -Vc 16 -d ATAPI:0,0,0
- this is the device i give when doing the backups so maybe this does somthing better. nope. when i use this, i teeps telling me to push enter once the disk has been inserted. it's already there!! inserted and all!! stop asking me for this.

any help on getting my images verified would be nice. my normal command to backu daily is:
mondoarchive -Ow 4 -d ATAPI:0,0,0 -I "/etc /home" -E "/home/mark/sw /home/mark/mp3 /home/mark/movies" -k FAILSAFE -s 700m -F

update - the problem seems to be a mondo problem. after checking their forum (and seeing a post of mine from a couple months back) i noticed that mondo seems to like to see a /dev/cdrom device. after creating a symlink for that, it seemed to work to verify my backup. after verifying, i restored a few files and that worked ok too. i'm only backing up my home and etc folders b/c the rest can be re-installed fairly easily. though i hope there's something in /etc that contains what i have installed.

yes, i think mondo has potential, it makes selective back/restore to/from cdrom/cdrw fairly easy. yes, mr. hugo the author/ maintainer has a few personality issues. the logging in mondo is horrible. i don't know the technologies it's using, but it certainly can use better logging. i'm use to the log4j stuff. it would also be nice to have a gui (kde) front end to configure your backups (cron times, folders to backup, backup media, etc). it would also be nice if running from cron it didn't just hang when it needs more than one disk. it would be nice... it would be nice... it does backup and restore nicely to from cdrw though.
[/i]

[pksings]

I am having issues with Mondo, it verifies just fine but will not restore.

So be aware that a successful verification does NOT mean you have a safe backup.

PK
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PK

[Minox]

[Stieltje]

hello.


I got the impression that one can use mondo to restore via nfs, but when I boot using the mindi disks, it still starts to look for a cd..

I do not have acces to a cd burning device, so a cd-less solution is a necessity.

I did not, however, include the nfs partition mount point in my path of things to install, but I recon that that really cannot be the error?
mondo saves the backup images in blocks of 700 MB iso-files :/ so I guess that the meaning of it all is still to burn a disc :/

hm, anyone have any suggestions ?

mondo by itself seems to be a nice program, that works without to many hitches
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