Monday, July 31, 2006

Grub may be broken after PBA restore

Windows backups and restores seem to be working well, but Linux restores may not boot up if the boot loader is Grub for reasons that I do not understand yet. Lilo does not appear to be affected. The error you will see is Grub getting stuck on boot. Only "Grub__" will be displayed. The good news is that with version 1.0.1 of the client, you can make your disk bootable by re-installing Grub. Here's how.

After the restore completes, quit out of the PBA client to the console. If you already restored your hard disk, you can boot up the PBA client again, and exit the client to the console. For these instructions, I will assume that your only linux is /dev/hda1 and you do not have a separate partition for /boot. If you have a separate partition /boot, mount it instead of the partition mounted to /.

Run these commands:
# mkdir /root/tmpmnt
# mount /dev/hda1 /root/tmpmnt
# grub-install --root-directory=/root/tmpmnt /dev/hda
# umount /root/tmpmnt
Reboot the system, and eject the PBA client CD to boot from your hard disk.

I will do this automatically in the next release of PBA.

Sunday, July 30, 2006

Personal Backup (VMware) Appliance v1.0.1 Released!

Version 1.0.1 of the Personal Backup Appliance has been released and is available for download!

Here's a list of changes:
  • ntfsclone is used for NTFS partitions.
  • partimage is used for partimage supported partitions except for NTFS
  • Device Image is used for partitions not supported by ntfsclone or partimage
  • added lzop compression for ntfsclone backups. faster than gzip.
  • removed a bunch of unnecessary packages to reduce VM size
  • PBA Client CD (pba-client-1.0.1.iso) is now based on INSERT Linux.
  • removed 'dsl-2-4' backup that was included in the 1.0.0 release
  • if more that one hard disk is found, user will be asked to choose one.
  • miscellaneous bug fixes
Personal Backup (VMware) Appliance v1.0.1
http://pba-vm.sourceforge.net

login: vmware
password: vmware
OS: Ubuntu 5.10
Size: ~300MB
License: GPL
VMware Tools Installed: Yes

DOWNLOAD: torrent
MD5SUM: 6dfafecae461b7a25067b6d456217ccb

Description:
The Personal Backup Appliance is a VMware virtual appliance that provides -TWO- crucial backup functions: (1) Hard Disk Backup, Clone & Restore (2) Simple NAS services.

Thursday, July 13, 2006

Xubuntu 6.06 LTS VMware Virtual Appliance

Current Version: 1.0.0
Release Date: 7/13/06

OS: Xubuntu 6.06 LTS
Size: 464MB
VMware Tools: Installed
login: vmware
password: vmware
Download: torrent

Description:
Xubuntu is a complete GNU/Linux based system with an Ubuntu base. It's lighter, and more efficient than Ubuntu with GNOME or KDE, since it uses the Xfce Desktop environment, which makes it ideal for old or low-end machines, as well as thin-client networks.