Re: [Clonezilla-live] Create an image of the disk without rebooting the server

[Kristian E. H. <kri...@gm...>]

On Thu, Jul 10, 2008 at 12:07 PM,  Steven Shiau <st...@nc...> wrote:
> Bill,
> Thanks for the information. Yes, Mondo Rescue is better than Clonezilla
> for this case.

There is a possible trick that you might be able to utilize.  I have
not tried it, but I think it may work :-)  VMware Workstation allows
you to specify a vritual machine that points to a a RAW DISK for the
"virtual disk".  In this case, you would point it at your server's
internal drive or drives.  Once you do that, go through with
specifying the guest type as Linux, etc, and then use PXE boot.  Have
clonezilla copy the entire disk or disks you want to clone.  Bam.  You
just cloned a live machine :-P  There are some possible downsides or
reasons this may or may not work as I have *NOT* tried it, but I
encourage you to!

* VMware is closed source.  Perhaps VirtualBox or KVM has a similar
RAW DISK mode feature.
* The host hard disk and partition might be in flux, and thus without
proper file locking, your cloned image could be
invalid/corrupted/incorrect.  It may be possible to clone the image
and then use a fsck utility to clean up the journal or other errors as
a result, but I would test this first.

Even though this is a silly hack suggestion, it just might work for
you.  Cloning a live machine via Clonezilla would be quite an amazing
feat so let us know if you are able to do so.  Regards...
-- 
Kristian Erik Hermansen
--
CISSP, CEPT, CREA, CEH, Linux+, A+, QGCS, ACSA, this is getting ridiculous...
http://kristian-hermansen.com