Let the Sunshine In: Software support engineer in Tokyo

This is a sequel to my Partimage entry. Partimage seemed to be able to do intelligent thing like backing up only 'used' sectors. But it didn't work for me. So, I decided to fall back to 'dd' way. I could have used Solaris boot CD or any other Solaris based Live CD. But I tried Linux based G4L(SourceForge.net: G4L or Freshmeat) Linux live-CD for 3 reasons.

1. Image file splitting. Actually, I later learned that splitting doesn't work over ftp. So, this really is NOT an advantage of G4L.
2. More file system support. NTFS, ext3. Solaris can do FAT32.
   
3. menu based

I think the 'G4L' name came from 'Ghost for Linux'. G4L uses dd for raw backup.

Here's what I did:

1. Booted up Solaris x86 machine with G4L CD.
   
2. Backed up /dev/hda to a bzip2 file called solx86.img on NTFS formatted external disk(/dev/sdb1). It created 42GB file from 120GB HDD. It took about 6 hours.
   
   
3. Created new VMware Solaris x86 guest. Specified g4l.iso file for CD-ROM.
   
4. Booted new VMware guest.
5. Pulled off external HDD USB cable from Solx86 machine and connected it to VMware guest.
   
6. Restore solx86.img. It was humming along to around 2% and suddenly finished. There was some error message but the message was overwritten by GUI. I couldn't jot the error message down.
7. Checked on bzip2 file integrity like below. Failed.
   

   $ bzip2 -tvv /mnt/local/solx86.img

   
   
8. Detached USB disk from VMware guest and attached it back to Solaris physical PC. Checked bzip2 integrity like above. Succeeded.
   
9. Retrying. Put the G4L CD back in old machine.
   
10. Backed up /dev/hda to a lzop file called solx86_2.img on FAT32 formatted external disk(/dev/sdb1). It created 48GB file from 120GB HDD. It took about 3 hours.
11. Boot VMware guest. Connected external HDD.
    
12. To catch the error I started g4l in a different way.

    $ g4l 2>/tmp/g4l.err

13. Restore solx86_2.img. It again finished abruptly at 2%. /tmp/g4l.err file has error logged.
    
14. Integrity check on lzop file. Failed.
    

    $ lzop -t /mnt/local/solx86_2.img

    
    
15. Connected external HDD to another machine and 'lzop' tested like above. Succeeded.

So, the error is with VMware. I have to try on newer version of VMware or VirtualBox.