Linux Desktop Hacks

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Chapter 9, Administration and Automation

#74 Clone Your Linux Install

HACK

Restore the Image

Now you should have a large file called image.bin in the root directory of /dev/

sda1 (or whichever partition you mounted on /mnt/foo). At this point, you

should unmount the disk to which you wrote the image. If you used an exter-

nal USB drive, you can plug it into any computer onto which you want to

clone this Linux install.

To restore the image, you literally do the commands in reverse. You need a

Linux boot CD of some sort (such as Knoppix, SUSE, Ubuntu, or Red Hat)

and boot into a recovery mode, or gain access to a shell (Ctrl-Alt-F2 when

you are in the installation portion of a distribution). Then you can load the

usb_storage module again, and mount the external hard disk:

foo@bar:~# mkdir /foo

foo@bar:~# modprobe usb_storage

foo@bar:~# mount /dev/sda1 /foo

Now you need to partition the disk on the new machine using fdisk or a sim-

ilar partitioning tool. A root partition and a swap partition are required.

Assuming that the root partition is the first partition on the disk and the

swap is the second, you need to format the swap partition using the follow-

ing command:

foo@bar:~# mkswap /dev/hda2

It isn’t necessary to write a filesystem to the root partition, because the

image is providing a filesystem. At this point you can load the image file

onto the hard disk using the

dd command again:

foo@bar:~# dd if=/foo/image.bin of=/dev/hda1

As you can see, the command just reverses the source and destination of the

input and output. When this is finished, you need to mount the partition

and

chroot into it so that you are “inside” the Linux installation:

foo@bar:~# mkdir /install

foo@bar:~# mount /dev/hda1 /install

foo@bar:~# chroot /install /bin/bash

The last line tells the system to pretend the root directory is /install, and run

the bash shell upon entering it. Now you need to sort out the bootloader for

the system. Most systems use either LILO or GRUB. In the case of LILO,

you need to run

lilo in the chrooted environment. This will write the neces-

sary code to the master boot record:

foo@bar:~# lilo

With GRUB you need to run grub-install:

foo@bar:~# grub-install /dev/hda