Chen, Helen Y wrote:
Hi,
I am running Fedora 13 with the 2.6.33.5-112-2.2 kernel, and am trying to make an ISO image of my hard disk for other use. Unfortunately “mkisofs” failed because /proc/kcore exceeded its 4GB file size limit. In fact, the size of the kcore on my system is shown to be 128TB, and the machine itself only contains 2GB of RAM. Has anyone experienced the same problem? BTW, the kcore files on my redhat machines reflect the actual RAM size as it should be. Also, does anyone know why “mkisofs” even tries to copy a virtual file into the ISO image it is creating?
If "other use" means non-Linux, you will have to exclude the things others have mentioned. You will lose some information going to ISO-9669 format, you may not care. If you want a real backup, loop mount a 4G file with an ext2 and copy everything to that, preserving ownership, etc. Then unmount and burn to a DVD. Linux will be happy to mount an ext2 DVD and all permissions and ACLs will be preserved.
Note, I'm just typing this in, engage brain before copying! # cd /tmp # dd if=/dev/zero bs=1M count=4k of=bkup.ext2 # mke2fs [options] bkup.ext2 # mount -o loop bkup.ext2 /mnt/loop # for n in / /boot /home; do cp -ax $n /mnt/loop/; done # umount /mnt/loop # growisofs -Z /dev/dvd=bkup.ext2
I do similar stuff, although if I really care about the data, I often make the loop file smaller so I can add dvdisaster software ECC to the image.
hth