On Wed, Jan 22, 2003 at 09:24:39AM +0000, Gary Stainburn wrote:
On Wednesday 22 January 2003 10:10 am, Phil Driscoll wrote:
On Wednesday 22 January 2003 8:48 am, Chris Puttick wrote:
I know I should be able to do this, but many years of using Ghost have made my brain go soft. Can someone talk me through cloning 12 identical machines? I was assuming something like tar, tftp and lilo, but the sites I found on the subject just confused me...
I did this yesterday on my own machine when my main hard disk overheated and started making funny noises - however I had the new and old hard disks connected to the same machine.
All I had to do was dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb - although I had to do much agonising before hitting return just to make sure I was doing the copy in the correct direction. Note that this takes ages as you copy the entire disk surface, not just the area covered in files, and the destination drive has to be at least as big as the source.
This also has the problem that if the two drives don't have the same geometry it may not work. Generally if they have the same number of heads and sectors and the cylinders is greater on the target you'll be okay. It does work in other circumstances but it's not guaranteed. It's a case of suck-it-and-see.
Also, bear in mind that if the source is mounted at when you're copying, you may end up with an inconsistant target with filesystems needing fscking etc. If you're going to do this, I'd suggest switching to runlevel 1 to close down as many services as possible, and 'sync' before starting. If possible unmount or remount read-only whatever you can.
For best results, run your system from a 3rd HD.
Or more easily a RAM disk or CDROM. These are supplied with most distributions or a Knoppix CDROM will do perfectly well. -- Mark Evans St. Peter's CofE High School Phone: +44 1392 204764 X109 Fax: +44 1392 204763