duplicating Linux installations - Was a wibble wish list

[Jim Cornette]

Ow Mun Heng wrote:

>On Thu, 2004-06-10 at 15:31, Jim Cornette wrote:
>  
>
>>Kevin Freeman wrote:
>>
>>    
>>
>>>On Thu, 2004-06-10 at 10:57 +0200, Chadley Wilson wrote:
>>> 
>>>
>>>      
>>>
>>>>I can prepare close 448 Linux hard drives a day using my two disk
>>>>duplicators. But with the windows drive I can triple that with ease,
>>>>because it only dumps the data not the free space too, a dump takes 3
>>>>mins for a 3gig install.
>>>>
>>>>   
>>>>
>>>>        
>>>>
>>>Have you tried partimage?  I have used it for backing up machines before
>>>swapping drives.  The images contain only used data blocks, and when
>>>restoring you have the option of skipping unused blocks - should be very
>>>fast if it can be used with your duplicators.
>>>
>>>http://www.partimage.org/
>>>http://dag.wieers.com/packages/partimage/
>>>
>>>
>>>      
>>>
>>Thanks for the mentioning of this program. We are getting ready to move 
>>onto Linux for a system at work. This sounds like a useful program. I'll 
>>try this out,  ghosting the linux drives seems to corrupt grub, with my 
>>few trials.
>>    
>>
>
>yeah.. Partimage is Good for exactly these sort of putposes. It also has 
>an option for transferring over a network. I duplicated my 30GB to my new 
>80GB with ease.
>
>
>  
>
I played a bit with the program today. I didn't get too far because of 
other thing that I had to do. The server version seems to be what I'm 
aiming to get working.
The use that I have intended for the program is to setup both MS and 
Linux based OS machines. We are moving away from windows and heading to 
linux as the OS.
With using Ghost for setting up Linux, it does copy, but you have to 
boot from a boot floppy, then run grub-install. The grub is corrupted, 
but otherwise, the system seems to work properly. When doing a 
filecheck, it corrects a problem with the 8th inode.
I'm hoping that partimage does a better job for multiple OS imaging.
Thanks,
Jim