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Linux Desktop Hacks
book

Linux Desktop Hacks

by Nicholas Petreley, Jono Bacon
March 2005
Beginner to intermediate content levelBeginner to intermediate
342 pages
15h 55m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from 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:~# ...
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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596009119Supplemental ContentCatalog PageErrata