At Sat, 3 Oct 2009 08:33:48 -0700 CentOS mailing list centos@centos.org wrote:
More follow-up as I am discovering and learning:
You don't even need the live cd. Just boot up single user, plug in the USB drive, format it with ext2 or ext3 to match the box and do your cp -r, although there are probably better options (eg dump/restore, tar, etc.) that might do a better job. Warning: there might be more than one partition (eg /boot and/or /home might be a separate partition, esp. if the machines are using LVM). You might need to cp each partition/ file system separately.
I booted to a the CentOS 5.23 LiveCD.
Yes, it looks like LVM is running because I do have VolGroup00- LogVol00 in Local Logical Volumes on the desktop.
Can I get the whole VolGroup00 at once, I see an entry in /etc/fstab for /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00?
So after booting to the CentOS 5.3 LiveCD, I can get to '/mnt/ VolGroup00-LogVol00'
doing a: 'sudo du -h --summarize /mnt/VolGroup00-LogVol00' I get: 28GB used.
So can I 'rsync -av /mnt/VolGroup00-LogVol00/. /mnt/disc/sda1/.' (sda1 is the 500GB USB Drive that I am wanting to put the data on.)
There is *probably* a /boot file system somewhere on the original machine's disk (not even grub can boot directly from a LVM volume). The /boot file system will contain the kernels, initrds, and grub's config files. Probably not much else, but if you do want to resurect these machines as *working* systems, you will need the proper kernels. This is partitularly true if you want to bring them up in a virtualized environment. I am not sure if your rsync command will pick up the /boot file system or not, since I am not sure if the live CD mounted under there or mounted it as /mnt/boot or something like that.
Best, -ML
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