Move Gentoo to RAID 0 [Solved]

[ericxx2005]

I will be wiping my hard drive and configuring it for RAID0, and was wondering what the best method to do this would be. I have an external hard drive to back the system up to/restore from. Is there a simple tar command that I can use to do this?


-Eric
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AMD 1090T | 2 GB | AMD 890GX | Gentoo x86_64
Core i7-920 | 6 GB | AMD 5850 | Windows 7 Pro

[alex.blackbit]

it is dd that you can use to backup and restore a partition, like

[BradN]

You could either tar up the whole system, or cp -a it to the external drive...

Make sure that if you use tar, when you restore it you need to use the -p option or permissions and things like that will be wrecked.

Also, another tip is that instead of just tarring up or copying your / directory, you should do something like "mount -o bind / /mnt/tmp" and then back up /mnt/tmp - this way you get only the root partition and not the other partitions mounted on it (ie, udev, /proc, /sys, etc).

So, a sample command to do the actual backup might be like:
cd /mnt/tmp; tar -cvzf /mnt/external/root.tar.gz .

and then, to restore it (from a livecd or similar),
cd /mnt/tmp; tar -xvzpf /mnt/external/root.tar.gz

You would need to use similar commands to back up other partitions, or manually bind mount (or mount them normally for restoring) them into the proper place in /mnt/tmp before proceeding with the above commands.

Make sure you've got /boot outside of the raid or you'll likely have issues booting from it (I don't think grub handles raid-0).

If you go with a cp -a approach instead of tar, you might be able to have a bootable external drive out of the deal, if you set up grub on it too.

Hope this helps, good luck