On Friday 06 October 2006 22:42, Joseph Cheng wrote:
Thx for all the suggestions ppl. I think for simplicity I will either go with the knoppix & dd solution or I also found ghost 4 unix http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/
I have used the dd solution a number of times, and it works quite well.
There are, however, a couple of suggestions I would make: 1.) Use the CentOS rescue mode (boot CD number 1, type 'linux rescue' at the boot prompt) and tell it not to mount your drives. No need to download Yet Another Linux Distribution to do the work. Or use the CentOS LiveCD. 2.) While the dd is running, you can check on its progress. Switch to another virtual console (you are by default on VC 1; hit ALT-F2 to go to VC 2) and send the dd process a SIGUSR1 (run a ps ax and make a note of the dd process's PID; then kill -USR1 $PID); then switch back to VC 1 and you'll see where dd is in your copy.
You can then run fdisk or parted and grow the partition; then you can resize the filesystem (I'm fairly certain the rescue mode includes the resizing program; not sure about the LiveCD, but I would think it does). The native CentOS tools to do this are, in my experience, far superior in quality to the various third party solutions (including Symantec Ghost) availabe to do this sort of thing. They are a little harder to use, though they seem to work better.