Re: [PLUG] Best tool to image a dynamic disk?

[PaulNM <plug@paulscrap.com>]

On 03/09/2017 12:36 PM, Greg Helledy wrote:
> > Brent gave a better, more detailed answer. I just want to point out that
> > if the only purpose of these disks is to act as physical disks for
> > mdadm, you're probably better off reformatting to standard mbr/gpt.
> > There's no reason to use a proprietary and poorly documented partition
> > layout, especially if there are no pluses to doing so. It's actually
> > hindering your flexibility.
>
> This is what ClearOS set up for us.  I wonder why it did that.  I
> certainly didn't mean to choose an option that was more complicated.

Wait, are actually sure it's a dynamic disk and not lvm and/or mdadm? 
This doesn't make sense, it doesn't even look like ClearOS is even 
capable of making dynamic disks. (I don't think any Linux or BSD system 
can.)

What makes you think you have dynamic disks in the first place, Paragon? 
I'm starting to think the Windows PE based Paragon is giving you 
misleading errors and labeling anything it doesn't understand as a 
"dynamic drive".

Try fdisk -l to see what kind of partitions you actually have. Other 
tools to look at are vgdisplay, lvdisplay, mdadm, and "cat /proc/mdstat".

> I'm not inclined to disturb anything on a working system.  It is RAID 1.
> >

Don't blame you for not wanting to mess with an existing setup, 
especially one that you're not able to backup. :)


> > I checked, and my favorite imaging tool (Clonezilla) can technically
> > back up dynamic disks just fine. It can't restore them though, so no
> > real point to it then. ;)
>
> If I can make a backup, that should be good enough--if the hardware
> dies, I'll slap the backup drive into a new system, update the data
> files and run a system update, and go from there.  I shouldn't need to
> do a restore.

Umm, I don't know what you think restoring is. A backup that can't be 
restored is completely useless. That's why folks recommend testing the 
restore process in any backup solution.

Clonezilla is a disk/partition imager like Paragon. If the filesystem 
doesn't get restored properly, you have bupkis.

Clonzilla can deal with LVM2 just fine. I'm a little unsure of mdadm 
raid 1. You may have to use the "dmraid=false" boot parameter when 
starting the Clonezilla disk.


I did a quick install of ClearOS in a vm with two harddrives, using the 
defaults. I ended up with /boot on one drive and the rest of the space 
on the two drives allocated to an lvm volume group. That in turn had 
swap and / logical volumes. I's also possible to setup raid arrays 
during install if you go into the manual partition setup.


At this point I think we're better off accurately determining what you 
actually have before trying a bunch of backup solutions.

- PaulNM




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