Hi:

new smartbook 3g running Maverick.
linux noob.

I am wanting to clone the ssd to an sd card. (and restore)

I assume that I should create a bootable usb stick and use it to store and restore the internal ssd to (and from) an sd card.

It looks like Remastersys might create the stick.
But alas I found no man page entry for it, and the command was not found in my path.

Given this build, what might be the proper approach for me to investigate?

Thanks

Hi Terry,

You cannot boot from a USB stick on the Efika MX Smarttop or Smartbook as this relies on firmware support which is, as of yet, not implemented.

You may boot from an SD card and use a USB SD card adapter to put your "target" SD card into, however.

What you may do, and this is far easier than trying it yourself, is download the installer from the Platform Support links down on the front of this site's homepage.

If you have an SD card bigger than 2GB: awesome. Image the installer SD to it as per the instructions, eject and reinsert the card and then:
where the device name is your SD card. Use the command
.. and create yourself a second partition on the SD card. "quit" to exit parted, and you should be able to format your new partition with ..
Keeping the SD in the system, shutdown your Efika, and boot your system with it.

It will ask you if you want to trash the system: say "N" here and it will give you a console.

Log in as oem, with password oem.
It will compress your entire system as a gzip file and place it on the 3rd partition of the SD card. You may take it off whenever you like, or you may simply go into the second partition of the card and note the directory "home/oem" which is where the installer runs from. There is a tar.xz file in here which is the original filesystem. Delete it. Copy your tar.gz file from the 3rd partition here. Edit "oem-installer" (I use nano for this) to change the filename to the one you just generated, and now you have an installable SD card which will copy everything back to the system exactly the way we install systems from scratch.

You will need a 2GB SD card at least, and if you only have a 2GB SD card you may use a USB stick with at least 1GB of space on it to mount as /media in place of the 3rd partition.

It's technical but there is no really cute GUI way of imaging a system right now, this is the method we use in-house.

_________________
Matt Sealey

Neko:

Thanks for your response. It sounds like what you suggest may work fine for me.

It is good to know that booting from USB is unimplemented.

The lack of a gui tool does not bother me. My lack of knowledge about the structure of linux and ubuntu and the efika_mx_port_implementation definitely limits me right now more than I would like. I am still in a mode of spending 4 hours looking around to do 5 minutes of work. For even the simplest of things.

Last night I had finally decided I needed to grab a current installation image put it on an sd card and try to modify it to boot into a console. Then write a few scripts for storing the ssd to an sd and restoring the sd to the ssd. This way I could recover whatever OS and/or environment that I backed. So your response helps immensely.

Those scripts are already on the card, so you should have an easy task (they are all in the oem user's home directory). You may want to simply update the "maketarball" script to automatically mount your partitions, I do this by hand.

_________________
Matt Sealey

Neko:

Thanks so much!

Your instructions worked perfectly.
I successfully backed up and restored my current environment.

So now when I really screw things up, I can always recover to the last backup.

Thanks,
-Terry-