2 months ago I made a live DVD with Remastersys and all was well. Today I thought I may as well make another, but this time the DVD would not boot properly despite going through the motions. After the progress bar accompanied by the usual encouraging disc activity, there was just a black screen - prompt disappeared after 1 second. Same with Vbox when attempting to mount the .iso but here no hdd noises at all. There are no errors in the logs. I reinstalled remastersys and for good measure genisoimage to no avail. Other .iso images created with for eg. k3b can be mounted. I wonder whether one or other kernel patch or update since July has caused remastersys to become redundant on my Ubuntu - Hardy - in this case. It's a pity because I liked the instant gratification of mounting these .iso's in Vbox to test. (PS. My previously made remastersys live DVD still works - no probs.)
Try using the package live-helper instead of remastersys is your system is Ubuntu. Live-helper is easier to use than remastersys - it originates from Debian, but is apparently available in my Ubuntu repositories. -- Tom
Thanks, but I don't think this is quite what I want. I am looking for an imaging program and the only two free ones that seem stable and reliable are Clonezilla and Mondo/Mindi. Remastersys was great and the easiest to use by a long shot for backup (backup mode). The limit is 4GB but that posed no problem as I excluded several directories like 'Music', 'Videos' etc. that were in any case backed up to DVD with k3b. My iso's were around 1.9GB and took about 16 minutes to create - then I could immediately test them in VBox before burning to DVD. I reinstalled Ubuntu Hardy from scratch from a live dvd 5 months ago and had all my programs and settings as they were. Was a pleasure. Now, as I have no time to delve into why remastersys is not doing what it did before, I will try the aforementioned programs.
I see Mondo has ext4 support. Which means it's not a 'cul de sac' program .. https://lists.berlios.de/pipermail/mondorescue-announce/2009-February/000041.html
Seems like a nice program but takes its time. This little test worked well .. sudo mondoarchive -OiV -I "/home/Ocky" -d /home/Ocky/mondo -E "/home/Ocky/Documents /home/Ocky/Downloads /home/Ocky/Music /home/Ocky/Videos /home/Ocky/Pictures /home/Ocky/.Virtualbox /home/Ocky/mondo" -G -s 4400m -9 -gF where -O = backup -i = use iso files -V = verify backup -I = include backup path (overrides "/" which is default) -d = backup directory -E = excluded paths from backup -G = use gzip -s = size of backup media -9 = max. compression -g = gui mode (-F = supposed to remove request to write a boot floppy.) Main reason for using the command line to archive is that the Gui doesn't allow enough space for entering the directories to exclude ! It does not seem possible when running mondorestore to restore individual files, but maybe this will work when booting from live media and choosing to restore in interactive mode. Will try that next. Although it supports both 64 bit and ext4, in Jaunty mondoarchive should be run from the command line - apparently there is a problem with the scratch folder being incorrectly flagged as too small. I am not sure whether this still holds or if indeed it is the case.
On my system Mondo runs fine in live mode, but when booting from the DVD and running 'interactive' it's along process with the end result that my partitions could not be mounted > choose Abort Yes/No. I chose No and uninstalled Mondo/Mindi. Looks like CloneZilla is the one to go for. Actually I think it's faster and easier for a simple desktop user like me to just backup /home with k3b and do a fresh install. Remastersys no longer makes bootable DVD's on my system as mentioned in my initial post. (PS. Just burnt and tried a live CD of Linux Mint 7 (same as Jaunty). The menus are ridiculous. In gnome one can just r/click > add launcher to desktop etc. and I find the traditional gnome menu much faster to use. After 30 minutes using Mint live CD I don't know how to do this - unless I enable the gnome main menu.) Regards.
Hi Mrk, If you run a Live CD and install packages over top of it, will remastersys backup create a new .iso file of the current (in memory) state of the Live CD + installed packages? I have 4GB of memory, but only 3G available, and more like 1.8 GB after I add the installed packages from tarballs to the Live CD booted up. -- Tom
