[Dump-users] Best way to consolidate partitions with 'restore'?

[Brent B. <br...@vi...>]

Hello, I am trying to use 'restore' to put the contents of /, /usr, and 
/opt onto one / partition.  (I also have a /var, /tmp, and /home 
partition, but I'm leaving those alone and only consolidating /usr and 
/opt.)  My question regards the best type of restore operation to do this.

Obviously I'm going to want to repartition and then mke2fs the new root 
partition, and do 'restore -rv' from tape to put the old contents of / 
onto the new big root partition.  But then...

What about /usr and /opt?  The man page says that '-r' should only be used 
on a pristine volume that has just been formatted.  That would no longer 
be the case for my root partition now that I've just restored the old / 
onto it.

So I use -x instead?  The man page for restore says the -x option will (if 
possible) restore "the owner, modification time, and mode."  What about 
the creation time...last access time...group...hardlinks...special/sparse 
files?  The author of the man page may have just been omitting such things 
for brevity, but it gives the impression that a -x type restore is quite a 
bit less complete than a -r.  Which I shouldn't use (it says) on a 
filesystem that already has data on it.

That leaves -i as the only other option, which I suppose I would use by 
interactively selecting everything to simulate a -r without whatever nasty 
effects I would get from an actual -r.

I'm so confused.  <g>

What's the best thing to do here?  How should one best restore an entire 
volume dump preserving as much of the original metadata and filesystem 
structure as possible into a subdirectory of an existing filesystem with 
data on it?  -r?  -x?  -i with everything selected...?

-- 
Brent A. Busby  	"The killer application for Windows was Visual
br...@ca...	 Basic. It allowed you to make your hokey, self-
Pekin, IL   (USA)	 made applications that did something stupid for
			 your enterprise...."  --Linus Torvalds