Repartition using networked disk images
Mar 12, '04 09:30:00AM
Contributed by: Anonymous
This is about how I installed Linux on a second partition on my Mac, which originally had just one partition containing Panther. It assumes you have access to a second machine on your network, and have installed and know how to use CarbonCopyCloner.
- Mount a remote share using SMB. Mounting my Samba shares on my Linux box turned out to be extremely slow (1 MB/s over a gigabit
network), so use a Windows server instead. You can also use an NFS share, but see below first.
- Start the Disk Utility and create a new read/write (not compressed -- see below) image on the remote share. Don't be cheap! It's better not having to redo everything because you're out of disk space on the image, even if it takes ages to create the image. I think you need twice the amount of space that you will back up in order to make an Apple Software Restore image.
- Now make sure there are no mounts in /private/var/automount or CarbonCopyCloner (CCC) will try to backup your entire network! Simply killing the automount process will not work, since it's required by CCC. I shut down the NFS server on my Linux box instead.
- Start CCC. In preferences, make sure "Create a disk image on target", "Prepare for Apple Software Restore" and "Read-only" (not
compressed!) are checked.
- Select source disk and the newly created (and mounted) disk image from step two as target, supply the administrator password and press
"Clone." Wait forever while all your data is transferred over the network.
- In case you managed to create too small a partition in step two, so that the final step (converting for ASR) fails, you can do it manually
using Disk Utility now.
- Boot using your OS X CD, repartition and install a basic system. Then log in and transfer the image you created in the previous steps
to an empty partition.
- Again, boot using the OS X CD. Restore the image that you transferred in the previous step.
- Reboot and rejoice for a while.
- Install Linux.
NOTE: Something is very wrong in OS X. I don't know what it is, but my machine must have crashed like ten times during the time I tried
this. In the end, I had quit using NFS and switched to SMB, created all images using non-journaling filesystems and stopped using sparse disk images. Only then could I complete the backup.
[robg adds: I have not tested this one, and clearly, a FireWire hard drive will make the job much faster -- unless you're lucky enough to have a Gigabit Ethernet network, it's going to take a long time to copy multiple gigabytes of data across the network.]
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