Re: [Xen-users] Creating a Xen image from HDD partition

[Dane Miller <dane@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

----- "Yoav Felberbaum" <mailinglists@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I have a "stock" CentOS 4.4 installed on /dev/sda3 (with a RHEL  
> install on /dev/sda2). How should I create a xen-usable loop image  
> from the CentOS partition?

First, boot into your RHEL installation so that /dev/sda3 is not in use.
 
> Would the following (paraphrased) command work from RHEL ...?
> 
> dd if=/dev/sda3 of=/path/to/file.img

Yes, but it will use lots of disk space.  Try this instead (as root) ...

  # make a sparse file and put a filesystem on it
  dd of=/path/to/file.img count=0 bs=1M seek=##size in megabytes##
  mkfs.ext3 /path/to/file.img

  # mount the partition and the sparse file
  mkdir -p /media/sda3 && mkdir -p /media/file.img
  mount /dev/sda3 /media/sda3
  mount -o loop /path/to/file.img /media/file.img

  # transfer the files via tar-over-pipe
  cd /media/sda3
  tar cf - * | (cd /media/file.img; tar xvpf -)
  umount /media/file.img

When this is done, compare the sparse file size as reported by ls and by du...
   ls -lh /path/to/file.img
   du -sh /path/to/file.img

The difference between these two numbers is how much space you saved.

Dane

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