Re: Installing five identical systems...

[Michal Jaegermann <michal ellpspace math ualberta ca>]

Chance Reschke wrote:
> 
> > 
> > 
> > then you can do a dd, example
> > 
> > dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb
> > 
> 
> This is the correct way to duplicate disks.

Provided that both disks you are using are **really** identical
and very often they are not even if nominally they are.  It often
works but it very far from a guaranteed way.  Depending on relative
**actual** sizes you may either end up wasting parts of your target
disk which will become inaccesible, or writing a partition table
which claims that there is more available blocks than in reality.

>  Using cp or other
> file-system-level tools requires you to:
> 
>    first partition the target disk exactly like the source disk

Totally incorrect.  And exactly **because** you may use different disks
and partiton and format (say, with different block sizes or i-node
density) them differently this is in general a preferred way.

  Michal