Hi guys,

I have a redhat laptop and a sun solaris 8 server networked together

I created an nfs share on the sun server and backed up an image of the Redhat laptop to it.
The Hard disk size of the laptop is 40Gb but I have about 38Gb free space on the sun server. So I compressed the image while backing up.

# dd if=/dev/hda | gzip > /NFS_MOUNT/backup.gz

This created the file OK.

Now I'm testing a restore.

So I have donwloaded System Rescue CD and booted the laptop with that.
I've set up the ip address and default gateway and can ping the Sun server.

I've then mounted the NFS partition, and can see the backup file.

However when I try to restore with the command:

# gzip -dc /NFS_MOUNT/backup.gz | dd of=/dev/hda

I get an error: No space left on device.

Am I missing a step? I thought dd would just overwrite the disk.
Does this mean there is not enough space on the sun server or not enough space on the redhat laptop?

When booted with the system rescue cd the output of sfdisk -l has /dev/sdaX where I was expecting /dev/hdX

Can anyone help?

Many thanks and kind regards,

Stin.

Sounds like you should be restoring to /dev/sda then. I'm not sure if it's okay to use the whole raw disk as opposed to an individual partition (sda1/hda1), though.

Thanks for the suggestion. I have tried that with the same response.

If I used dd to backup /dev/hda then I thought I'd be able to restore the same.

I might try restoring /dev/hda1 2 etc and then sda 1 2 etc,

What do you think?

EDIT: I get the same thing each time."No space left on device".
The command appears to work suggesting the syntax is ok.
Am i missing a step preparing the disk?

Sure your rescue cd knows about -dc parameters to gzip? Is this maybe some busybox-like gzip?

BTW: If you boot that system backed up that way you'll likely face some complaints by the OS about existing looks it does not like - do not expect that image to work out of the box.

Hi there,

THanks for the swift reply.

I've changed:

# gzip -dc /NFS_MOUNT/backup.gz | dd of=/dev/hda

for

# gunzip /NFS_MOUNT/backup.gz | dd of=/dev/hda



And it seems to be working. I'll let you guys know.

THat didn't work either.
It just took longer to fail.

What does the gzip -dc do?

It decompresses (-d) from/to standard input (-c).