Theresa Kehoe
Thu, 28 May 2009 10:08:08 -0700
Hey all, We have been looking into alternatives for disk cloning. Robert's scripts have served us very well in the past, but now that there have been changes to GRUB, they will no longer work (we found this out trying to clone an Ubuntu 8.10 image -- 8.04 will work, but nothing newer).
Clonezilla doesn't include resizing partitions (although we can do that with gparted), and a two-program, two-step operation seems a bit kludgy. Plus it got all huffy when I tried cloning disk-to-disk where the source was bigger than the destination. And its user interface would be formidable to a newcomer. Bill suggested I try Acronis, and it works a treat! Also very important -- using Acronis, I was able to clone a newly-installed Ubuntu 9.04 disk. So, this solution should continue to work for us in the future. The setup I'm using is: - reasonably fast PC (AMD64 3200+ processor, 1GB RAM) - disk to be cloned from on IDE0 on Master slot on ribbon (jumpered cable-select) - disk to write to on IDE0 on Slave slot on ribbon (jumpered cable-select) - Acronis CD in CD-ROM drive on IDE1 on Master slot on ribbon Process is: - Boot from CD, start Acronis True Image Safe Version (maybe it's just the copy I've got, but the Enhanced mode which includes USB and such just sits and spins and hangs and goes nowhere) - select function to clone hard drive - select the source and destination drives - tell it Yes, delete partitions on the destination drive - click OK at the Linux prompt that says you may need to fix your master boot record (the prompt refers to LILO, which hasn't been used since before 2006 in the Debian/Ubuntu world) -- also note that I am doing NOTHING but cloning, and every copy so far has booted up just fine afterward, including 9.04 - about 5 minutes later, click OK at the prompt that the disk has been successfully copied - shut down machine and disconnect power - remove cloned drive, put in another one - lather, rinse, repeat A couple of notes: make sure the disk you are cloning from (master) is jumpered to cable select, and not to master. If it's jumpered as master, then the resulting clone will ONLY work if it's jumpered as cable select. If you boot with it jumpered as master, then it starts to boot up, then fails because the drive's UUID isn't what is expected. Odd, but perfectly repeatable, behavior. Our Ubuntu EAC image is a single partition (uses a swap file as opposed to a separate partition). When I made the Ubuntu 9.04 install, I accepted their defaults, meaning a separate swap partition. Although it took longer to make the clone with two partitions rather than one, the resulting disk booted up just fine. Part of the way through this process, I kept getting what I thought were bad hard drives to copy to (not unlikely, but ... THAT many all in a row?). A little basic testing showed that the ribbon's slave slot was bad. Replaced the ribbon, all is good. I'll wiki this, but thought it worth passing on to the list now. I took a bunch of drives home with me (we updated the student and OEM images late Saturday afternoon, so they're as current as possible), and we now have half a dozen OEM disks, 11 of the disks for the St. Elizabeth Academy's new Ubuntu computer lab, and I'm working on student images now. Come Saturday, we'll have plenty of cloned drives to work with! Theresa