On Fri, Jul 06, 2001 at 11:55:28AM -0500, Simeon Johnston wrote: > > find . -mount -print | cpio -pdumva /mnt/tmp > > What does this do? find . -mount -print Generates a list of all files in the current directory and its subdirectories on the same device. (i.e., If you do this in / and /usr is mounted from elsewhere, this won't descend into /usr.) cpio -pdumva /mnt/tmp Copies each file passed on stdin (which is coming from find, so it'll be everything on the partition) to the same relative path under /mnt/tmp. See man cpio for all the gory details. IOW, this does exactly what you probably assumed cp would do. However, a plain cp would hose all your file permissions (everything would be owned by the user who ran cp (probably root)), set all file creation times to when the cp was done, turn symlinks into real files, and just generally screw things up. cp -a (-a = archive) is less bad, but is still tripped up by links and special (/dev/foo) files. You can do tricks with tar that will usually get you copied over safely, but cpio is generally agreed to be the best/safest way to move directories that contain more than just regular files. > > umount /mnt/tmp > > fsck /dev/sdbX > > fi > > I really don't understand what the find command above does. It uses fsck to verify that the copy of your filesystem is valid, after unmounting it. Running fsck on a mounted fs is generally a Bad Idea. (Unless it's mounted read-only.) > If you mean cp won't work I can understand that. How bout "cat"? cat would probably cause even more problems than cp. > I just need the info from the partitions copied. I can rerun lilo. > Actually, I'll have to rerun lilo. Not an option. Correct.