sed - stream editor hints and tricks

Cheap Disk Cloning

I had a number of computers in my lab at ECPI College of Technology that I needed to clone. With volume licenses from Microsoft the process of cloning was simplified. However, I did not have any software for cloning.

I decided to take advantage of all of the Fedora Live CD's that I use for my Linux class. Since these Live OS disks do not use the hard disk, I am free to copy and move the contents over the network without corrupting the disk. The remainder of this blog will give a tutorial on how to clone hard disks of the same size, over a network.

Goal:

• create a fully-loaded XP OS and other programs used in the lab
• copy the XP image to all of the other computers in the lab
• do it for free using a Live Linux distribution

Method:

1. Prepare destination disk on remote machine by:


2. Loading Linux Live CD (I used Fedora 8 and/or Fedora 9)


3. Prepare the drive so that it has the same configuration as the source drive by clearing the old partitions and creating new, matching ones.
   
   


4. Verify that the disk has the NTFS type set.



5. Very important: write the disk partition to the disk:
   
   
6. Prepare for dd copy
   
   


7. Watch the progress to make sure that everything is moving along by sending a USR1 to the dd process on the destination machine. We must go to the destination machine as root, find the dd process started by the source machine and send USR1 signals to see how fast the copy is proceeding.
   
   
   


8. After you boot the destination machine, you will have name conflicts on the network. You should rename your machine and get a new sid. I used the tool that was made by System Internals and which is still made available by Microsoft: newSID. The tool can also rename your machine at the same time it is generating the new SID.