Forgot to mention these are laptops (for primary use), so it will have to be over a network, (or from a CD?)

-----Original Message----- From: Gary Stainburn To: Phil Driscoll; Chris Puttick; 'suse-linux-uk-schools@suse.com' Sent: 1/22/03 9:24 AM Subject: Re: [suse-linux-uk-schools] Cloning machines

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.

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.

I would try and avoid even a modest clone over a network these days. The smallest drive CCL sells is a 30GB disk. Without doing any maths, I would say that even over a 100MB LAN, that's going to take a while, and that's after all the other technical problems.

However, I'm sure that someone who actually knows what they are doing

might

be aware of a better way :)

Cheers