Re: how to create an image of your debian computer hard drive for cloning

On Tue, 2008-09-30 at 23:14 +0200, Hans Ekbrand wrote:
On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 09:49:08PM +0200, Aniruddha wrote:
On Tue, 2008-09-30 at 14:18 -0400, David Clymer wrote:
On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 1:11 PM, Robert Robert <robertrobert93@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Dear All,
I was wondering how I could make a clone or image of my computer hard disk
that contains debian OS. I want to do this in order to make an exact copy to
another clean pc with no os at all. What complete free software can I use
for this ? Is there a manual some where on the net about this ?

I highly recommend Clonezilla-live. it makes cloning to/from any sort
of storage very simple. You can clone to an attached usb drive, to a
network drive via nfs, samba, or ssh. (http://www.clonezilla.org/)


Clonezilla uses partimage which I haven't found too reliable. I still
prefer to tar /. It works perfectly every time.

To tar / will not

- partition the disk
- make a partition bootable
- put the right files on the right partitions unless the partitions are
- created manually
- mounted at the correct mountpoints.

The OP mentioned a "clean pc with no os at all", which sounds much
like an unpartitioned disk, on which tar / will not work at all (since
there is no partitions and no filesystem to untar to).

-Boot livecd
-Run cfdisk
-Format partitions
-Unpack tar
-Chroot
-Adjust config files
-Run grub-install

This takes about 30 minutes. Alternatively if one really want to do bare
metal recovery; image products from Paragon and Acronis are the best
choice.


--
Regards,

Aniruddha





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