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July 2011

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Subject:
From:
Yasha Karant <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Yasha Karant <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Thu, 28 Jul 2011 07:09:38 -0700
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On 07/28/2011 02:21 AM, Alexander Hunt wrote:
> On 07/28/2011 12:48 AM, Yasha Karant wrote:
>> On 07/27/2011 11:23 PM, Steven J. Yellin wrote:
>>> On Wed, 27 Jul 2011, Yasha Karant wrote:
>>>> ...
>>>> Is it safe to do the merry chase down the dependency trail to port a
>>>> later parted to SL 6 or will some of these cause SL 6 to fail/become
>>>> unstable? Does anyone have a SL 6 port of either parted or gparted
>>>> that is more recent than the stock SL 6 versions?
>>>>
>>> You asked about SL6, but my experience with SL5 may be relevant. The
>>> stock SL5 parted wouldn't make a label on a 3TB WD USB drive (4096 byte
>>> sectors), so I compiled what was then the latest version, parted-2.4,
>>> from ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/parted/. There were no absent dependencies,
>>> installation put the result into /usr/local/sbin, leaving the stock
>>> version alone, and the compiled version was adequate. They're up to
>>> parted-3.0 now.
>>>
>>> Steven Yellin
>>
>> I tried your suggested approach first but did not mention this in my
>> posting. Below is the failure from configure of parted-3.0 on SL 6 :
>>
>> checking for uuid_generate in -luuid... no
>> configure: error: GNU Parted requires libuuid - a part of the
>> util-linux-ng package (but
>> usually distributed separately in libuuid-devel, uuid-dev or similar)
>> This can probably be found on your distribution's CD or FTP site or at:
>> http://userweb.kernel.org/~kzak/util-linux-ng/
>> Note: originally, libuuid was part of the e2fsprogs package. Later, it
>> moved to util-linux-ng-2.16, and that package is now the preferred
>> source.
>>
>> End output.
>>
>> I was going to start chasing down the above dependencies, but instead
>> attempted the Fedora path -- and again faced a chase as I previously
>> have noted. If I install / build the various parts that parted-3.0
>> requires, will I break SL 6? One option is to build (configure, make)
>> all of the parts without make install and customize the configure/make
>> paths in each component to find the parts in non-standard locations so
>> as not to "clobber" the stock SL 6 components.
>>
>> Does anyone have a parted-3.0 ported to SL 6?
>>
>> Yasha Karant
> Have you considered using a live CD of one of the fedora versions (I
> prefer F13 for that, but maybe it would have a problem with those drives
> too, so perhaps F14 or 15) to do the partitioning and then do the SL
> install? I've had to use that method in the past with Seagate drives.
> Just a thought to keep you out of dep hell.
> There is also the new parted magic live CD that may be better than
> Fedora because the tools are already in the distro.
> http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=partedmagic
>
Thank you for the suggestion.  I actually had, but for the moment, have 
rejected the idea.  I shall explain my reasoning and please correct it.

My machine does not have eSATA -- although I may have to get an eSATAp 
card that does not have a controller but merely connects to an available 
SATA data cable and then the necessary cable to attach any of the 
various form factors of SATA drives (the docking station I have will 
accept either a desktop workstation or a laptop form factor SATA drive). 
  The motherboard on my workstation has ample free SATA ports and a 
large enough power supply (1.5 kW) to supply an eSATAp without issue.

Without eSATA, and given the difficulties that I have encountered with 
USB 3 support in stock SL 6 (USB 2 is prohibitively slow to clone a 
drive in the TByte capacity range), would one of these live CDs allow 
("see") an external USB 3 drive as /dev/sdX (or /dev/hdX or ... ) for 
some X?  With eSATA, this should not be an issue.

Details:

I am using my faculty workstation for now to clone hard drives in that 
we do not have a dedicated cloning facility.  Unfortunately, the drive 
from which I am cloning is a standard 512 byte sector drive, whereas the 
drive that is the target is one of the WD Advanced Format units, and 
thus a regular dd operation -- even with different input and output 
block sizes -- would not work because the input file system format would 
have partitions and internal file pointer contents (in an inode, for 
example) that would not point to the correct locations on a drive with 
very different internal block boundaries.  If the sector sizes are the 
same on two disks, and other compatibility issues are met, and because 
the internal firmware on modern drives and controllers handles typical 
bad block issues, if one has two devices (say /dev/sdX and /dev/sdY, X 
.NE. Y), then a simple dd from sdX to sdY should copy all of the 
relevant partition and file system information, allowing one to
mount the various top level directories of the cloned drive and make any 
necessary changes (such as the IP address for the target machine if, e. 
g., DHCP is not in use).  Given the data rate of USB 3 and the existence 
of USB 3 SATA drive docking stations (e.g., an external USB 3 drive 
enclosure without the need of mechanically opening and closing an 
enclosure to insert or remove a drive), my plan was to use dd over USB 3.

Yasha Karant

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