As far as I know I do not have LVM installed/active (whatever the term) on my system.
However, when I am on my XP drive and try to use either Norton Ghost 14 or True Image 11 to create an image of my Linux drive they try to create a massive file from the entire disk.
I know that both work well with ext3 but if they see LVM they will treat it as an unknown filesystem and revert to sector by sector copying.
When I use Yast and select Partition Tool | LVM … I get a message box telling me that at least one partition must be of type 8e to use LVM.
This suggests to me that I do not have LVM on my system. Is there a way to check and see?
If I do not have LVM does anyone have any idea why I am experiencing the above problems with disk imaging?
It could be that the 256-byte (up from 128-byte) inodes in 11.0 are confusing the third-party tools. This is mentioned in the release notes when you installed.
Some more research indicates that you are correct. I suppose I could do a backup of everything and then reformat with True Image and then install and tell OpenSUSE not to format. That should work, right?
Is there any serious disadvantage to running OpenSUSE 11 on a filesystem with 128 byte inodes?
Would restoring from a PartImage or Clonezilla backup reset the inodes to 256 or does a restore leave that alone?
I believe you do have to format. The inode size is set at format time. So you have to do a backup, format and restore. Not sure why you want to format with True Image when OpenSUSE can do the format. You can change the inode size during the OpenSUSE install.
I don’t think a partition image will do the job, you would be backing up the inode size in the image and restoring it.