backup up a laptop disk for replacement

[bscott at ntisys.com]

On Mon, 18 Nov 2002, at 9:46am, Ken.Coar at golux.com wrote:
> this resulted in the new disk being 'dirty' when i booted from it, but the
> only file essentially not read-only was the swapfile -- which doesn't have
> persistent info.
> 
> worked a treat.  i would have preferred to boot from a cd, but you canna
> do that if the superbay has an hdd in it. :-)

  Just FYI, if one cannot boot from CD, booting with the kernel option

	init=/bin/sh

can be useful.  It forces the kernel to start a shell as the initial
program, without doing *anything* else.  (If you have an initial ramdisk,
that will still get run.)  No other programs will be run, no scripts
executed, and no other filesystems will be mounted.  With the "ro" kernel
option as well, even the root filesystem will be read-only.  You can then do
things like dd'ing the disk to another disk, without worry of corruption due
to the system writing to the disk during the operation.

-- 
Ben Scott <bscott at ntisys.com>
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