On 7/30/11 2:03 AM, Benjamin Smith wrote:
> On Friday, July 29, 2011 08:02:20 PM Les Mikesell wrote:
>
> > If the machines are pretty much identical, clonezilla should work. Boot
>
> > the machine with a 'clonezilla-live' CD or USB drive. If you can attach
>
> > the target drive to the same machine you can go disk->disk. Otherwise,
>
> > connect to something on the network with enough space to hold the image
>
> > (ssh, nfs, or a windows share) and clone disk->image, then boot the target
>
> > machines and copy image->disk. There is also a server version that will
>
> > pxe-boot the targets if you need to do a large number of them.
>
>
> Thanks for the tip! I'll be trying this out on Monday, but what is the "native"
> way of doing this?
For disk image copies, you can use 'dd' with the raw disks. But it won't know
anything about the filesystem and will copy all sectors. Clonezilla will use
partclone (or ntfsclone for windows) and only copy the used blocks so it is much
faster with large disks. In any case the partitions must be unmounted or at
least not changed while being copied, so you need to boot from something else.
I recommend the ubuntu-based version of clonezilla for better hardware support.
Also, you'll need to fix up the network settings and hostname on each clone
after you bring it up.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell at gmail.com