Re: Installing five identical systems...

[Chance Reschke <reschke astro washington edu>]

> > > 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.

For identical disks the dd method works reliably.  For non-identical
disks, as long as the target disk is as large as the source disk it's safe
if not not efficient.

> 
> >  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 partition and format (say, with different block sizes or i-node
> density) them differently this is in general a preferred way.

No, not totally incorrect.  The question was how to duplicate, not how to
make a similar copy.  To make a similar copy you're fine creating target
partition sizes different than the source, then using something like
tar/cpio/cp to copy files.  Just be sure your target partitions are big
enough to hold everything.

 - C