Duplicating a F7 installation.

[GianPiero Puccioni]

You wrote
 > Hi,These work, with obvious limitations:
 > dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb
 > dd if=/dev/sda | ssh other box dd of=/dev/sda
 > You don't need to run grub. The MBA and everything, up to the size of
 > the source disk, is copied.

Thank you for your prompt answer!

I am not sure what is the best for my setup which is a machine with no 
CD reader but only USB (I made the first installation with USB+NFS).

I planned to do the dubbing with a USB for the system and a second one 
for the Data. At the moment I have only one machine so I cannot do tests 
but I want to be ready. I don't think that the dd method is doable this 
way as the data wouldn't fit in a USB key (I suppose I have to dd the 
whole partition not only the data) while a tar could do it.

Another possibility is using an external HD with all on it. In this case 
I could dd the whole HD (it's only 40G).

Do you think a procedure like this would work

1) prepare a bootable external HD with space to spare
2) boot the test machine from the ExtHD
3) dd if=/dev/sda of="file on the ExtHD"
4) shutdown and boot another machine from the extHD
5) dd if="file on the ExtHD" of=/dev/sda

Probably overkill, copying all 40G for less than 2G of data..

Maybe I could dd only the first partition (/ is 10G) and tar the other 2
/home and /var (it's possible that / will be read-only but this is 
another problem). But should I dd /dev/sda1 or /dev/sda with bs=10G 
count=1 (or something)? I suppose the last one would copy also the MBR 
and partitions so at this point I could just untar in the proper 
partition (mkfs first?).

Or maybe the minimal approach would be to dd only the first blocks where 
the MBR is, partition the disk with sfdisk, mkfs the partitions, mount 
all somewhere and untar the whole stuff in the proper place. This could 
be done from a USB key (4G maybe).

All of this should be done with minimal intervention so everything must 
be in a script but this is not a problem

Do you think this last kind of approach would work?

Thanks again.

GianPiero
-- 
GianPiero Puccioni                   |Istituto dei Sistemi Complessi-CNR
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