HOW TO: Save and reload your curent Sabayon setup

[phd7]

This could also apply to moving Sabayon to a new partition.

Having decided to revamp my computer, I tested out Sabayon amongst others and decided to use it as my main distro.

Because I had already updated Sabayon a couple of times, I didnt want to reinstall the original download and then have to do all the updates again (not to mention reconfiguring all the configuring I had done)...so I used fsarchiver with the GUI qt4-fsarchiver via Linux Mint ( because fsarchiver was in their repo ,and there are .deb packages available from http://qt4-fsarchiver.sourceforge.net) and made a copy of the Sabayon partition to an external disk.

It is an extremely easy way to back up partitions and the files can be reloaded to a different partition, even on a totally new revamp of the computer.

So after DBANning the disk and popping in a live CD (Debian derivative again so I could install fsarchiver+GUI again) , set up the new partitions , opened qt4-fsarchive and restored Sabayon to its designated partition. I did the same with Linux Mint Debian edition, by the way. Couldnt boot the computer yet ,as there is nothing in the MBR. Then installed another distro (Hybryde, in this case) to its partition and saved its bootlaoder to the MBR.

From Hybride, ran sudo update-grub which found Sabayon and LMDE (as I had saved their bootloaders to their respective partitions when I installed them originally).

So the 3 distros are accessible but, as I now want to use Sabayon as my main one, there were a couple of tweaks I wanted to make.

1) Move the Sabayon home directory to a dedicated partition which I had previously set up.
I simply followed the instructions on this page which moved the home directory and it's contents (mainly hidden files) to the new /home partition:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Partitioning/Home/Moving

2) Replace the Hybryde bootlader in MBR with the Sabayon bootloader (so I dont have to boot into Hybryde every time I want to update grub).

Just 2 commands:

sudo grub2-install /dev/sda
and
sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg


Hope this is helpful.

Note* When I checked the new partition UUIDs with sudo blkid and compared with the /etc/fstab files, the UUIDs for both distros' root partitions were the same in blkid + fstab but the swap partition in fstab was different. Iassume it just copied that UUID from the previous installation so I just changed the entry in fstab to the one from blkid

Needless to say, I will be using this qts-fsa to back up sabayon before any future updates.

Ialso downloaded a live CD version (well really a 600MB gnome 3 distro with qt4-fsa preinstalled) and put it on my Multisystem USB stick for future use.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/qt4-fsa ... s/Live-CD/

[wolfden]

moved to correct forum, not an installer issue. Stuff like this should be in the wiki also.