On Thursday 06 September 2007, Paul Johnson wrote: > This has been a humbling experience. If anybody does come with with a > step by step fool proof way to make this work, I would be really glad > to hear it. I have done it the hard way before, and then I found the easy way. Paragon Partition Manager's Rescue CD. Note that if two disks are identical then you can just dd the whole disk at one fell swoop: that is, dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb Set the blocksize to some multiple of the cylinder size; run fdisk -l, find the cylinder size, and find the largest factor of the number of cylinders to multiply by. It doesn't really matter exactly what the blocksize is with modern zoned disks, but any blocksize is better than the default, as long as the total size of the disk is an integer multiple of the blocksize. I have cloned numerous systems that have had identical drives, and haven't had these sorts of problems. But the key is the disks have to have identical parameters for this to work. Paragon Partition Manager's Rescue CD Just Works, 99% of the time, and can resize, slice, and dice your partitions while it's doing it. Think Gparted++++. Now, if the disks are not identical, you have more work to do. Note that copying a smaller disk to a larger disk will work just fine; I did a 40GB to an 80GB raw disk dd (using the /dev/sdX and not doing each partition individually) and it just worked. Copying a larger disk to a smaller disk is more of an adventure, but it can be done. The key is to resize the source disk's partitions before doing the dd, then doing the raw dd. You can use parted or similar tool (the bootable Gparted CD with Clonezilla works pretty good for this, even with NTFS partitions), shrink the last partition down, then dd it across. I actually keep a set of sysprepped Windows 2000 and XP images that have been shrunk down to minimum size; I can dd that image from the file server (using something like: "ssh fileserver.pari.edu cat /backup_set/win2k.img | dd of=/dev/sdX") then run either the Windows native diskpart tool or parted/Gparted to grow the partition to the full disk. So I have a 4.5GB WinXP sysprepped image that I can easily deploy as needed; I keep the image current and updated, and already have the settings, users, etc all set up; the sysprep tool sets things up to ask for the CD key and do activation upon firstboot. Grow it to the destination disk's size, and deploy the workstation. This assumes very close hardware; odd hardware still requires separate installs. I have gone through the pain of rebuilding initrds before; I had to change the SCSI card in a server quickly (the old card failed, it was a production server, and it needed to be back up RIGHT NOW), and I didn't have the correct card on hand. I changed out the controller, booted the rescue CD, had it mount my drives, and I was able to rebuild the initrd fairly quickly with mkinitrd. There was editing involved of a few files, but the key is to remember the --preload and --with options. -- Lamar Owen Chief Information Officer Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute 1 PARI Drive Rosman, NC 28772 (828)862-5554 www.pari.edu
