Duplicating a F7 installation.

[John Summerfield]

GianPiero Puccioni wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I have to install some machines with F7 and then make several modification
> to it  (so the kickstart would help only partially) and I wondered if it 
> is possible to duplicate the installation copying the HD.
> 
> If the machine, HD and partitioning are the same can I copy the data 
> with tar
> or dd or whatever and have it in working order? What about the MBR, can 
> it be copied? What about if I install GRUB on the first partition?

These work, with obvious limitations:
dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb
dd if=/dev/sda | ssh otherbox dd of=/dev/sda
You don't need to run grub. The MBA and everything, up to the size of 
the source disk, is copied. If the target disk is larger, you have free 
space at the end. you can create new partitions, and with care you can 
probably enlarge the physically last one. Ask google.

Don't do this if the target disk is smaller.
If you need to restructure paritions, then do that and then
1. Mount someplace, maybe /mnt/newdisk
2.  use tar (or similar)
     tar clC / . boot | tar xC /mnt/newdisk
or  tar clC / . boot | ssh otherbox tar xC
3. Use grub in the new location. It's probably possible to do it right 
here, but I'm not going to say so without testing it.

Practice with a test box, my instructions are fairly terse. You can also 
mount source or dest on nfs, one or both can be in an external USB2 
enclosure.

You could also look at systemimager.

> Has anyone tried to do something similar?

Several times. Do it carefully.

Once I went from not using LVM to using LVM. That was a little trickier. 
It's my favourite technique for recovering from desperately dodgy disks.

btw The first one also clones Windows quite nicely, but watch your 
licences and hardware compatibility.

Using other tools, the second can copy Windows quite nicely. I've done 
it several times, and I see another two coming up - one's a laptop and 
HPA is involved. Another challenge.




-- 

Cheers
John

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