I am pretty much a QNX newbie. Although we have had some of the QNX 4.25 systems for about 2 years, they have been pretty trouble free. However, I need to get into a better situation concerning backup/recovery.
We have several systems that I would like to backup or preferably image. I have an external USB 2.0 200 Gig hdd. I would like to use a boot floppy of some kind, run a disk image program and save the image to the USB drive.
I’ve tried Drive Image, True Image and Ghost 5.? (5.2 I think)
Drive Image and True Image both produced images that could not be restored. Both packages claimed the images that they produced successfully, were corrupt when I tried to restore them.
I have successfully imaged and restored a test QNX 4.25 disk using Ghost - at a smoking speed of about 50 mb/sec. I can only do so on a Windows 98 se machine running Ghost, with a QNX drive installed as a slave. I can’t make it work from a boot floppy. By the time I get the Win98 boot, Duse DOS USB drivers, large drive patch and Ghost loaded up, I run out of memory.
If it turns out that I just can not do disk imaging, I would appreciate help coming up with a standard procedure to restore a crashed disk. The limitation is that the only write output I have is 1.4 mb floppy. I have cdrom but not r/w.
I suppose I could save the boot image and application files and ?? on floppies.
Then, if (when) a disk crashes, I can install the OS on a new hdd, then copy the application files back. But this is obviously more work (more importantly, time consuming) than simply restoring a disk image.
I have been able to use Ghost 2003 to backup QNX 6.2 system. I ghost the drive over ethernet to my notebook computer then burn a CD from my notebook. The backups have worked without problems so far. The only problem that I have is that Ghost does not understand the QNX file structure so it does an image of the sectors. What I now find is that the backup image keeps growing. I would be interested in finding a defragmentation tool and maybe a tool to clear out the data in the free disk space so that my backup can be reduced to something that will fit on a single CD. Does anyone know if there is a tool for defragmenting a QNX drive / partition?
I do not use anything else but tar and gzip.
I have the boot-floppy, it lets me to start Fsys.eide and mount partition, fdisk, dinit are there too (just in case). Then I start TCP/IP and move the archive from|to the server.
This will work ONLY if the driver you restore to has the same size has the original, so in general that’s dangerous. In 2 years from now you are unlikely to find the same type for HD -)
