[H-GEN] Problem using Ghost to rollout/clone Linux systems

[Steven McIntyre]

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<more text chopped>
> > Hi Ewan.  Any reason you didn't use dd?
> 
> That was going to be the next option to try.
> 
> Reasons for not trying first;
> It would mean taking the HDDs from both the original machine and the
> potential clone and putting them into a third machine already running
> Linux / Unix.  A time and resource consuming process compared to using
> Ghost, but certainly not out of the question.  With Ghost I can get an
> image off the 8.4Gb disc in 15-20min and clone a new system in about
> 7min over the network.   Theoretically, Ghost will also allow me to
> adjust partition sizes when cloning to different size HDDs.

  Actually if you boot from the Debian CD you can pull up a console
without doing the installation. From there you start dd and
the fun begins ;-)  I've been advised that this operation fails
with the RedHat CD as the relevant devices don't exist in /dev.
They can be manually created from the console via the following lines.

mknod /dev/hda b 3 0, mknod /dev/hda1 b 3 1, mknod /dev/hda2 b 3 2 etc
mknod /dev/hdb b 3 64, mknod /dev/hdb1 b 3 65, mknod /dev/hdb2 b 3 66 etc
(for /dev/hdc add another 64, and for /dev/hdd add another 64).

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda is proving to be a very popular line
at work when I get systems with viruses.

  in theory dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb would work however I've never
actually done it.  This would be interesting if the drives had
different geometries.  I have images of fdisk displaying messages
along the line of "partition doesn't end on cylinder boundary".

-- 

Steven McIntyre
stev at uq.net.au

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