My work laptop hit end of life recently, and I received a replacement this week. This of course means the obligatory deletion-of-windows-xp and installion-of-a-real-OS (in this case the latest Foresight), which is a good thing considering I had troves from 37 labels on my last install.

I decided I wanted the entire hard disk image from my old lappy so that I could keep it around for some time, thus ensuring I won't lose any information. Now I could have grabbed a screwdriver and done some physical muckery to accomplish such a task, but that would be no fun. I found a much more novel experiment.

Attempt 1 involved a LiveCD. very direct. just boot off the CD, mount the hard disk and start moving bits over the network (easy because rPath LiveCDs ship with conary, making them extensible). This worked, but was heniously slow. I don't think it would have finished in a week.

So on to attempt 2. I took advantage of our PXE boot images. Of course all we have are anaconda install images, so I booted the latest rPath installation media in rescue mode. I then made a mount point and mounted tmpfs onto it. This gave me the ability to create a custom chroot of whatever I wanted directly in RAM. A quick install of tar and openssh-client later and I was off and running. After bind mounting my hard disk image into my new ram-chroot, I just tarred the contents of my entire hard disk and piped it through ssh.

Conary's dependency model is the real home run here. All told this took 78M of RAM to get the entire set of runtime dependencies needed to extract my hard disk.

(update: changed 78K to 78M. that's a silly typo)