Validation tests I hope to run or see run

A list of tests (with their status) appears below. I lack the disk space to easily perform all the tests, as others verify their functionality, email me and I will update this page. My system is currently a dual booting AMD-K6 with the VIA chipset, 64 MB PC100 ram, Red Hat 5.2 Linux, and a Philips 3610 CD-Rewriter. I have the latest versions of cdrecord, but any reasonable version should work.

DD archive and restore of a linux drive

I used dd with a mounted linux disk, archived the entire disk across a network using rsh, dd, gzip and backburner to a CD-Recordable disc, overwrote the entire disk with zeros, and restored it via the backburner suggested script. The test worked perfectly. The unused part of the disk must have contained zeros, as my compression rate was phenomenal (1.6 gig of data backed up to less then 1 CD-Recordable disk). I was able to use the Red Hat recovery disk, and simply gunzip and dd the image right back onto the original drive. Lilo came back intact, the partitions came back intact, and aside from an fdisk (necessary since the original image was made from a live mounted disk), the resotred image worked perfectly.

Tar archive and restore of a mounted ext2fs (linux) partition across a network

Used tar across a network to backup a complete Linux filesystem with the command rsh printicheep 'tar -cvf - /' | gzip | bbcapture --tempfile /mnt/dosc/tempburn/backburner.tmp --device cdr -log /tmp/bblog.txt . I then made my self root on the backed up machine, changed to the root directory, simulated a system disaster by issueing the command rm -rf * . Don't try this at home kids, it killed everything but the /proc directory. I then rebooted the victim machine using the normal RedHat 5.2 recovery procedure (you need two disks for this, one system specific disk that was created when you installed your system, and a second general recovery disk that can be made from an image on the CD-Rom). The system booted, and dropped me in as root, and I used the fdisk command to discover which partition was my main Linux filesystem (in my case /dev/hda2). I then ran the fsck (now all you K3wL WaR3z D0odZ know what that command actuall does, it is not just a substitute for profanity in your clueless rants) command on the partition (I was unable to shut down cleanly after destroying the system) with the command e2fsck /dev/hda2 followed by many many "y" answers as the disk was recovered. When this was complete, I created a /mnt/recovery mount point (mkdir) and mounted the (basically empty) filesystem with the command mount /dev/hda2 /mnt/linuxrecover . Finally, I changed to the /mnt/linuxrecover directory and issued the command dd if=/dev/hdb skip=1 | tar -zxvf - (where /dev/hdb is the device file where my ancient ATAPI 2x CD-Rom shows up). Test being performed as I write this, but probably will not be complete before I post this revision. Did the device files come back correctly? What about the /var and /proc files?

Tar archive and restore of a Windows partition

Use tar with a mounted MSDOS fat32 system, archive the entire hierarchy using tar and backburner to a CD-Rewritable disc, reformat the DOS partition, and restore it via backburner. I am a little bit chicken here... I use Linux but my wife uses Windows to do volunteer work for our church, and I don't want to trash her setup and have to spend 3 days getting everything working again. I have backed up the disk (via tar and gzip), and it looks pretty good. As long as you have mounted it as a vfat file system, the long file and directory names look like they get backed up fine. The only thing that could foil this approach is if Windows gets at the registry or other mysterious but critical files via some sort of stored sector address instead of going through the file system. This would of course be a terrible idea, but there seem to be no shortage of these in the Windows design. I have had much grief just trying to move an existing windows installation from an old hard drive to a new hard drive, but this was always done via DOS tools, so perhaps DOS is getting what it deserves. Somebody with an extra hard drive laying around needs to try this, or send me an old 2-5 gig drive (all my drives are currently doing something usefull, and I just spent the toy budget upgrading to a Palm IIIx) and I will give it a shot and report the results. The stuff to watch for here is corrupted registry entries, weirdly renamed files, or instability (errr... I mean increased instability) of the recovered installation.

DD archive and restore of a Windows partition

Use dd with an umounted MSDOS fat32 partition or disk, archive the entire partition using dd and backburner to a CD-Rewritable disc, overwrite the entire DOS partition or disk with zeros, and restore it via backburner. Test not yet performed (actually I did the backup, and it seemed to work fine. See notes above about my chickenness and my toy budget. Somebody with lots of extra disk space should make an expendable windows installation and give this a test). Questions to be answered: Did the registry come back correctly? Did the the disk need to be scandisked? What about the boot sector? Partition table? Long file names? I expect this will work perfectly, and would be a great and easy backup and restore approach. The only problem is that the restore must be atomic, and cannot simply be individual files (like a tar archive would allow).