Answering my own question...
Dec. 21st, 2007 09:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexpgpNothing like going out and doing it yourself, y'know.
Yesterday, I decided to take eeexubuntu out for a spin, but just to be on the safe side, I performed the following steps to save what I had on my eee (BTW, I had already successfully removed unionfs from my eee, combined the first two partitions - more about which below, and removed a heck of a lot software I have no use for. The following steps *won't* work for a straight-out-of-the-box unit.)
1. Boot from the eeexubuntu live disk. Verify that the eee "hard drive" partition was, indeed, /dev/sda1 (I prefer to use "sudo fdisk -l" for the job, though perhaps there might be something more intuitive out there).
2. Insert a 4-GB flash disk. (Micro Center had one on sale for $35). Verify the device name. In my case, it was /dev/sdd (/dev/sdb was the eeexubuntu flash drive, /dev/sdc is my SD card).
3. Invoke: sudo dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/sdd1
4. The LED on the 4-GB flash drive starts to flash like crazy. Wait for the operation to complete, then remove the 4-GB drive.
After completing this step, I installed eeexubuntu. The install went well, and I like the look and feel but found enough problems with it to decide to revert back to my saved image. The procedure for that was:
1. Boot from the eeexubuntu live flash drive. Insert the 4-GB flash disk with the eee image on it. Verify device names.
2. Since the eeexubuntu install involves creating a swap partition, I had manually deleted the old /dev/sda1 partition and created a new /dev/sda1 formatted for Linux and a /dev/sda1 as a swap partition. Now that I was going back to Xandros, I deleted both of these partitions and created one /dev/sda1 partition out of them (basically reversing my steps). There's probably a better way to do this than using fdisk, but that's what I did. Make sure all changes are saved.
2. Invoke: sudo dd if=/dev/sdd1 of=/dev/sda1
3. The 4-GB LED starts flashing. Wait, but don't go away for long, because reading the data back is faster. Once the procedure is complete, the eee is ready to reboot.
NOTE: 4 GB is not always 4 GB! At the end of the restore, I got the following message:
Partition 1 has different physical/logical ends
(physical: 490, 254, 63)
(logical: 491, 145, 37)
Basically, if I understand this correctly, the USB drive is apparently just a hair larger, relatively speaking, than the space available in /dev/sda1. I have to assume that, since nothing could have been written to the "difference" between ends, that this message can be safely ignored.
Cheers...
Yesterday, I decided to take eeexubuntu out for a spin, but just to be on the safe side, I performed the following steps to save what I had on my eee (BTW, I had already successfully removed unionfs from my eee, combined the first two partitions - more about which below, and removed a heck of a lot software I have no use for. The following steps *won't* work for a straight-out-of-the-box unit.)
1. Boot from the eeexubuntu live disk. Verify that the eee "hard drive" partition was, indeed, /dev/sda1 (I prefer to use "sudo fdisk -l" for the job, though perhaps there might be something more intuitive out there).
2. Insert a 4-GB flash disk. (Micro Center had one on sale for $35). Verify the device name. In my case, it was /dev/sdd (/dev/sdb was the eeexubuntu flash drive, /dev/sdc is my SD card).
3. Invoke: sudo dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/sdd1
4. The LED on the 4-GB flash drive starts to flash like crazy. Wait for the operation to complete, then remove the 4-GB drive.
After completing this step, I installed eeexubuntu. The install went well, and I like the look and feel but found enough problems with it to decide to revert back to my saved image. The procedure for that was:
1. Boot from the eeexubuntu live flash drive. Insert the 4-GB flash disk with the eee image on it. Verify device names.
2. Since the eeexubuntu install involves creating a swap partition, I had manually deleted the old /dev/sda1 partition and created a new /dev/sda1 formatted for Linux and a /dev/sda1 as a swap partition. Now that I was going back to Xandros, I deleted both of these partitions and created one /dev/sda1 partition out of them (basically reversing my steps). There's probably a better way to do this than using fdisk, but that's what I did. Make sure all changes are saved.
2. Invoke: sudo dd if=/dev/sdd1 of=/dev/sda1
3. The 4-GB LED starts flashing. Wait, but don't go away for long, because reading the data back is faster. Once the procedure is complete, the eee is ready to reboot.
NOTE: 4 GB is not always 4 GB! At the end of the restore, I got the following message:
Partition 1 has different physical/logical ends
(physical: 490, 254, 63)
(logical: 491, 145, 37)
Basically, if I understand this correctly, the USB drive is apparently just a hair larger, relatively speaking, than the space available in /dev/sda1. I have to assume that, since nothing could have been written to the "difference" between ends, that this message can be safely ignored.
Cheers...
