Best solution for installing OpenSUSE 12.2 into an erraticly built laptop system

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1

Hello,
I have a laptop with some programs installed. I wish to back them up into an external harddisk, fully format the laptop (because I am only using the 20 GB of 250 GB harddisk, there seems to be a problem; I would like to erase all partitions and format a new fresh partition and install OpenSUSE 12.2 into it).
Backing up problem: What do you suggest? From the internet I have seen a simple cp command to back up everything. Do you agree with this approach? My data to back up is less than 15 GB, I presume.

2

So do you have openSUSE installed and working or is it Windows or both? If its just data, a by file copy will work. If its a copy of Windows, you may want to use some Windows backup program, but if you try to restore to a different partition, it may not boot when done. So, a little more info on what data are you backing up and from what Operating System?

Thank You,

3

I have not used it, but I have heard that clonezilla can backup a system with windows, and restore it to a suitable running state.

I have done that with acronis, which is relatively inexpensive but not free.

4

Thank you for replies. I would like to tell you something to clarify something.

  1. There is no Windows installed, there is just Windows XP virtual machine installed to OpenSUSE 12.1.
  2. A simple cp command is told to be successful. Do you know anything about this?
    Thank you for your interest.
5

open a terminal window, do a


man cp

and you’ll have all the info we could give you.

6

Yes, except in a case of trying to create a replacement hard drive partition as being identical to its source, a by file copy makes the most sense and can easily be copied back to its required location, in mass or file by file as required. The basic syntax would be like this:

cp -r /home /MyBackup

The-r is recursive, meaning all sub folders and files from the source, in this example /home, which would copy all of users from the home area to the /MyBackup where the contents of MyBackup would appear the same as /home after the copy was done, not including if anything was already in the MyBackup folder before the copy was started.

Thank You,