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Topic: Looking for suggestions, Readying PC's for kids

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ke4nt1

Group: Members
Posts: 2329
Joined: Oct. 2003

Posted: July 22 2004,18:01

Nope....
That would make a great data backup, but it's not gonna boot.

Cloning involves copying the partitions, not the data.
That includes the MBR, bootloader, etc..

Find a program that will do disk-to-disk cloning...
Norton "Ghost" used to run off a bootable single floppy..
You could select master, select target, and go drink coffee.
When you come back, pull target drive out, insert into new box,
and reboot... voila!
Insert another target drive into your first machine,
select master, select target, go drink coffee......yadayadayada.

Many other cloning programs out there that run from either bootable CDR or floppy.

Tha's what I'd do if I needed to make a couple hundred clones.

73
ke4nt

clivesay

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Posts: 935
Joined: Dec. 2003

Posted: July 22 2004,18:08

Wow! That would be alot of coffee! I wouldn't sleep for a week!!

I will do some investigating. I think this would probably be the best route for me.

So if I delete the .xserverrc file before I do the cloning then each install would prompt me for the setup options upon the first boot or sould I have to run xsetup.sh for each install?

Sorry for all the questions. I am trying to visualize all of the steps.

Thanks

Chris

cbagger01

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Posts: 4264
Joined: Oct. 2003

Posted: July 22 2004,23:14

With a bootable linux distro and network cards you can do your hard drive cloning for free and without the need to physically install or remove a hard drive.

Basically, you would do something like this:

Manually install and customize 1 PC until you have your "perfect PC".

Boot up a second PC and use it as a file server to store a copy of your "perfect PC" hard drive partition. You will need to boot up your "perfect PC" using a linux livecd because you do not want the contents of the hard drive to change while you are doing the hard drive backup.

For a simple solution, you can use the "dd" command and combine it with the netcat or "nc" command to transfer your image without the need to set up a network file share and all that stuff.

Then all you need to do to clone a PC is:

Boot your "blank pc" using a linux livecd.
Create your hard disk partition using a program like cfdisk.
Use "dd" and "nc" to copy the "perfect PC" image from your fileserver over to your new "blank PC".
Run "lilo" to make your new "blank PC" allow a bootup into Linux.
Reboot computer and let it boot up from the hard drive.
Change the computer name so that your new computer will have a unique name on the network.

Repeat this process for every "blank PC" that you wish to clone.

See this links for more details:

http://www.rajeevnet.com/hacks_hints/os_clone/os_cloning.html

You can also use the "partimage" program on knoppix or system rescue CD to do your disk cloning over the network.

Also, you can use the Ghost for Unix or "g4u" bootable bsd disk to do network drive imaging.

And if you don't have the ability to do the transfer over the network you can use CD-R disks to do your hard drive cloning via a program like Make CD Rom Recovery
http://mkcdrec.ota.be/project/

clivesay

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Posts: 935
Joined: Dec. 2003

Posted: July 22 2004,23:30

cbagger01 -

As usual, you are just a wealth of information. I wish you were my neighbor!

I will take a look at all of these options. Thanks so much for the input. You have helped me tremendously the entire 7 months I have been into Linux and I really appreciate it!

Take care

Chris

ke4nt1

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Posts: 2329
Joined: Oct. 2003

Posted: July 22 2004,23:55

Addendum to cbagger01's excellent post..

Quote

And if you don't have the ability to do the transfer over the network
you can use CD-R disks to do your hard drive cloning via a program like Make CD Rom Recovery

I have used the Acronis True Image software,
Powerquest Drive Image, Paragon, and Symantec.

All are good backup/restore utilities...
Most of them are way too FAT in my opinion..
( Powerquests' PQDI boot-cdrom wants 128Megs RAM to boot ! )
...screw that...

I'd go with cbagger's choices, especially if your network cards
aren't too weird, and don't require crazy configs to make them go..

And whichever method you use, get a BIG coffee cup..

ke4nt

15 replies since July 21 2004,23:27

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