On Wed, Jan 22, 2003 at 10:10:48AM +0000, 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.
Best only to try this disks having exactly the same geometry.
I've not done this over a network, but if I had to, my instinct would be to boot up a floppy based distribution (maybe keeper?) and arrange things so that I could see the source drive or a tar.gz image of it somewhere over the network, and then use the dd command to do the work.
Far more efficent is to create the file systems you want, then use "cp -a". Which will work with just as well with an NFS mount as a local HDD. Though you will need to then use a boot FDD/CDROM and run LILO. Does this help or do you need more details? -- Mark Evans St. Peter's CofE High School Phone: +44 1392 204764 X109 Fax: +44 1392 204763