gentoo restore disk?

suicideducky · Apprentice Joined: 29 Jan 2007 Posts: 208

ok well im a kind of... distro fiddler? (need better term, someone please come up with one

)

in other words i keep fiddling and tweaking.... and to be honest, breaking. last year i prob had installed about 20-30 ish distros in the year, including of course reinstalling the same one from scratch so about 20 different distros and say 10 reinstalls id say. and now im fixed with gentoo (although i still have ubuntu on a diff partition)

basically what id like is to be able to insert a disk, boot into it, it gives a prompt asking if i want to continue, and then installs gentoo, with all the right drivers, xorg conf, alsa conf etc. and ends up coming out with a gentoo install (no graphical enviorment) at which point i can install whatever i like on top of it.

is this possible?

thanks again, Ducky

belrpr · Guru Joined: 22 May 2006 Posts: 440

I know that it is possible.
But how is something I like to know 2.

suicideducky · Apprentice Joined: 29 Jan 2007 Posts: 208

it would be great.
basically i would like a cd i can pop in, and it boots up to a minimal enviorment (similar to the minimal install CD) and at my command installs gentoo with the same xorg.conf, alsa conf, make.conf, etc.

and when finished is just like a fresh gentoo install plus my xorg, alsa, make.conf, etc.
and maybe could be build upon. but basically itself builds mostly.

so its kind off like a restore to minimal enviorment cd.

ive found these links on live cd's
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO#LiveCDs

i guess it would almost be like the autocd except with my settings and it would only be used for the same computer each time. and hopefully mostly self executing or something close.

so i can put the disk in, boot it, partitioning, mount my partition as /gentoo and /gentoo/boot etc and then type in a command which starts the restore to minimal enviorment process.

thanks again, Ducky

JeliJami · Veteran Joined: 17 Jan 2006 Posts: 1086 Location: Belgium

take a look at Sabayon

it is based on Gentoo, and does a marvelous job at detecting hardware
it can easily be installed to the HD
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suicideducky · Apprentice Joined: 29 Jan 2007 Posts: 208

Jaglover · Posted: Thu Mar 01, 2007 1:00 pm Post subject:

Habit to reinstall every time something is broken belongs to Ubuntu world. A Gentoo user is expected to fix it instead of reinstalling. However, you can do a fresh base install and take an image of it with partimage or dd.
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thorpe · Posted: Thu Mar 01, 2007 1:31 pm Post subject:

You might want to take a look at building a custom stage4. I think there is an article on the subject posted on the wiki. From there, you could script your installation process.

All you would then need do is boot into the stage4 disk, run your script, chroot and continue with maybe another script.
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vandien · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 03 May 2006 Posts: 137

basically you need to write two scripts, one that you run from the livecd directly that sets up the partitions (might be safer to do this manually), installs the stage3 tarball, copies your already customized config files and a barebone portage tree, and then chroots to a second script. The second script updates the system and emerges some other small packages (or even X if you want). Using binary packages I can re-install my system (634 packages at the moment) in only a few hours.

Anyways, in short, yes it's possible. Sometime soon I'm going to post the updated scripts I use for this. I have an old post, but it's out of date and I wouldn't recommend using those scripts anymore.

d2_racing · Posted: Thu Mar 01, 2007 3:18 pm Post subject:

You can also use the Stage 5 Backup here : https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-534039.html

suicideducky · Apprentice Joined: 29 Jan 2007 Posts: 208

thanks all for the replys.

d2_racing · Posted: Thu Mar 01, 2007 6:18 pm Post subject:

Stage 4 is from Blinkeye and it backup only the necessary files except the dev/null and /dev/console.

If you have a Gensplash, you have 1/2 chances do have error when you will reboot, because sometime the Stage 4 is not capable to backup properly the Gensplash.

The Stage 5 can backup an entire installation.So, if you have only the partition /, the Stage 5 will create a full backup of that partition and because of that, you will not have any problems with the gensplash.

You can backup one partition at the time or you can backup an entire disk with separate partition.

nixnut · Posted: Thu Mar 01, 2007 7:31 pm Post subject:

Moved from Installing Gentoo to Other Things Gentoo.
Not about getting gentoo installed, so moved here.
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suicideducky · Apprentice Joined: 29 Jan 2007 Posts: 208