[Cialug] Transplant OS

chris chris at ia.gov
Wed Jun 24 07:50:15 CDT 2009


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> I believe you can set the UUID of the partitions on the new drive. "It
> is an power so great, it can only be used for Good or Evil".
>
> I don't believe there are any open-source tools which can create a
> back-up and restore to bare metal. There's always tools like Acronis,
> but they cost.
>

dd (or even cat) can  along with your favorite boot cd (I use knoppix)
can do bare metal restores.  Either from a backup image on attached
media or over the network.

If local attached media,  or nfs, some net file system,

dd if =/path/to/wholediskimage  of =/dev/newlocaldisk

Over ssh/rsh:

ssh remotehostwithimage 'dd if=/path/to/whilediskimage bs=1400' >
/dev/newlocaldisk

This is much faster with rsh since no encryption is done.

As long as the second device is bigger, you will usually be ok.  You
can use something like parted to reclaim any unused disk if the
destination was larger.

I once set up an imaging server that simple streamed a whole disk
image to any device that connected to a port on it.  This was done
using xinetd and dd.  I chose dd over cat because I could set the
block size to 1400 and get a more full packet.  More efficient,
faster, less IP overhead.

That reminds me, you can read a compressed image as well, works great
because you are moving compressed data over the wire:

ssh remotehostwithimage 'dd if=./diskimage.gz bs=1400'  |  gzip -d - >
/dev/newlocaldisk


All my examples are whole disk, but you can do the same per partition.

To create the back up images reverse the process.

crr/arreyder

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