[CentOS] clonezilla

Sun Nov 4 17:17:17 UTC 2007
Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>

Dag Wieers wrote:
> 
>> The clonezilla live project is a really nice way to do image-copies of
>> machines:
>> http://clonezilla.sourceforge.net/clonezilla-live/
>> but it's based on a Debian live OS which has some unfamiliar quirks. Has
>> anyone built something like this on a Centos base?
>>
>> For anyone who hasn't seen it, it can do whole disk or partition copies of
>> windows and most Linux filesystems and it knows enough to only copy the used
>> parts of the disk.  Among other tricks, it can also build a bootable iso image
>> containing itself and one or more images that you can load directly from the
>> cd/dvd.
> 
> Seems similar to partimage. If you use Recovery Is Possible (RIP) you have
> a small image (77MB) that contains a recent kernel with all tools you can
> imagine (with ntfs, cifs, partimage, ...)
> 
> You can put RIP on a small USB stick, or ISO or PXE.

Clonzilla probably uses the same underlying tools, plus ntfsclone as the 
default option for ntfs partitions, but I think it has better network 
support with options for multicast mass-cloning and the ability to 
store/load the images over nfs/smb/sshfs as well as local storage. It 
works fine as-is.  I just wondered if anyone had done the same on a 
centos-live distribution base.  One thing that would be a great addition 
would be if, after the image is restored to the disk, you could drop 
into the equivalent of a rescue mode boot and be able to chroot to the 
newly installed system without needed a reboot. But, I guess the NICs 
might not be detected as the same devices when booted with different 
kernels, initrd's or modprobe.conf files anyway.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com