Debian Installation :: Clone Root System And Make It Bootable?
Aug 10, 2010
Running Squeeze here. I added a new SSD to my system. Root is /dev/sda3 and I want to clone that system to the new SSD on /dev/sdb1 and make it bootable. I tried:
mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/ssd_root
cp -dpRx / /mnt/ssd_root
but to no avail. I cannot get the new system to be bootable and available through Grub. Part of the problem is that I do not know my way around Grub v2 so well, I could probably manage quite well with legacy grub. So, whats the easiest way to clone a system and make it bootable on another partition? Should I be using debootstrap, and importing/exporting the package list to install the same packages on the new system as the old? or is using cp -dpRx to copy the old ok? How do I make the new system boot?
I have a 16GB Ubuntu Webserver running on a Transcend SMART CF chip (Yes I know all the reasons not to). I want to move that entire system (OS, Files and structure) to an external bootable HD that will probably be closer to 100GB. What's the easiest way to do this and have it be plug and play. By which I mean I can then plug the drive into a new system and boot it up just as it was running on the old system.
I noticed that when using the "daily built images" from Squeeze via Netinst, during the disk partitioner, I am un-able to make the /boot partition bootable.or some reason I can't enable the 'boot' flag on several different ISO attempts and differenthardware vendors. The only thing I can see is that this is an issue with the netinst ISO image from the daily built images. Has anyone seen this or is this a known issue / bug? I don't want to file a bug report if possible but I searched and couldn't find anything on this. I doubt I am the only one who's experienced this so far.
I've read all the documentation on installing Debian via CD, USB, or HD.I need to install Debian on a embedded system using only compact flash.This is similar to a HD installation, but I don't have any version of Linux installed to format.Is there someway of creating a bootable CF image from a Windows system?
I've been trying to install ubuntu 11.04 64 bit on a partition next o windows 7 64 bit.When I use the default option (no matter how large I make the partition) I get the error message that not enough space could be created. I read this could e solved by defragmenting the hard drive which I did, but the problem persists.I next tried to partition manually but go the error message that there was "No root file system is de or something similar
Here is what I would like to pursue: I would aim to create a USB drive which a system can boot from if needed. However, this system would not be the generic Lucid 10.04 iso, it would have specific packages that my current system has. Also, it would start up and run with my current system settings if possible.
I did look into Reconstructor, but it doesn't appear that that would have the capibility of changing the default settings to match my current system's settings. Also, it looked like there wasn't a way to upload a list of current packages of my system (I would have to manually select each package, taking quite a while). So is there any way to make a bootable USB matching my current system? Or is reconstructor the closest thing to that kind of customiz-ability?
i recently installed Debian Lenny on my dad's EEE 900A. I initally tried Ubuntu's 10.04 version but it gave me problems with the WiFi function keys. Debian took me a while to configure based on the excellent Debian EEE wiki, and everything's so much saner now.
I installed Debian Lenny using LVM2, spanning the files over the built-in 4 GB SSD and a plugged-in 8 GB SDHC card. I followed the instructions in this wiki to set it up. I was wondering if there's a way to easily clone this system so that if my dad accidently screws it up the in the future, he would be able to restore it back easily. Obviously, he would have to make backups of his documents, etc. on a separate drive so he can restore them back after the cloned image with the basic drivers, partitions, apps, etc. is restored.
Here's the system's info. There are three partitions on /dev/sda (the SSD) and one partition of /dev/sdb (the SDHC card). /dev/sda3 and /dev/sdb1 have been combined to create a Volume Group, called 'vol-1'. 'vol-1' has two Logical Volumes - 'root' and 'home'. The file system on all partitions is reiserfs.
I wanted to back up my 4Gb boot drive and the new drive I had was slightly smaller. Couldn't find any info on here and precious little on the internet but I have previously used this technique to clone an 8Gb disk onto a 4Gb one. Since I have gained a lot of useful info from this forum over the years its probably time I contributed something. I used my netbook but this would work equally well from a live CD. Note the disk has to be unmounted so you can't use the live system. Firstly your USB stick probably has 2 partitions one for "/" and one for swap.
The first step is to reduce the "/" partition on the source drive to a size smaller than your target drive. I used gparted for this. Next create a partition on your target drive that is the same size or bigger than your newly shrunken partition. I formatted this although I'm not sure this is necessary. Personally I just used the whole drive and used a file on a hard disk as swap. Next you have to use dd to copy the partition.What is important is that you are copying the partition not the drive. So your source would be /dev/sdx1 and target /dev/sdy1 (you will need to find your own values for x&y).
Once again be very careful that you get these the right way around or you will destroy your souce disk. Even better do it in two stages - copy your source to a file and then the file to the target. Now you have a replica of your original disk but it is not bootable. If you are planning to use a swap partition you may as well create it now. Remember you will probably have to change /etc/fstab to read the new swap - at least on my system this was referenced by UUID. No need to change anything for the replicated partition as the UUID came over with everything else.
I am currently running x86_64 F14. I am replacing the HDD(s) with one SSD and one HDD. What I want to do is a fresh install but pull all of the packages over from current install. I am planning on backing up /home and all of that so I can just rsync it. One of the issues though is that I currently use LVM. LVM does not support TRIM yet for the SSD. So I was just going to use ext4 and an extended partition for all of my filesystems. Can I just make a kickstart file that will have all of my current installed packages in it and pass that to the install? Seems like I remember that from my RHCE class. Sadly I don't use kickstart enough to remember.
Which is bit tricky (I learn slowly linux unfortunately due to low skills in informatics)
The cdrom debian installer to be put is located here, http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/...86-netinst.iso
I tried unetbootin to make this pendrive, and it seems to be working, but not perfect. it hangs after the territory, saying that nothing into /cdrom is mounted.
Without unetbootin, how should we do to make a pendrive iso-cd/debian-503-i386-netinst-like bootable?
I have downloaded imgburn, then downloaded ubundo from hippo site. somehow sonic was also downloaded. I did not know what choice to make when it came time to burn a cd....now I can't get back to those choices....I am trying to make a bootable cd to install in a sonic laptop without an operating system. If by downloading ubuntu on my c/drive have I changed my os in any way...I have a hp compaq desktop computer using windows os..I am on a network with my husband
i have installed ubuntu on a virtual machine. i have also installed it on a hardisk partition. i have edited some package files and install the packages. it works great. now i want to ship this whole thing to my client. Can anybody tell me how could i make a bootable ubuntu cd so that my customized file are there in the cd and when the client installs ubuntu from this dvd he will get all the cusotmized packages preinstalled
I downloaded the Fedora-15-i386-DVD.iso and want to install Fedora 15 from it. I don't want to use the LiveCD version since it doesn't have all the packages. So I follow the tutorial given here under the section titled "How to Make a bootable USB Drive to Install Fedora instead of using a physical DVD ". Everything finishes off well. However. when I boot my computer using the USB, it says "USB doesn't have operating system. Safely remove and reboot".
Now, what to do? I also didn't get the line the tutorial saying, "You should now have a bootable USB stick which will run an 15 install. When you boot the stick, you may also add askmethod to the boot line and select a hard drive install and select the drive as /dev/sdb1 (or your USB device drive) and the path should be / " What am I supposed to do?
I come from a PCLinuxOS tradition (about two years), and a great full backup program was mklivecd, where I would use a GUI to make a bootable livecd/dvd with all my system which was handy in case something went wrong. Every week or so I would create a DVD ready for emergencies. After looking at the options in Debian (using Squeeze, and very happy with it for a few months now), I'm wondering if there is something similar. Remastersys, it seems, doesn't work with GRUB2 (only with GRUB-legacy), and Partimage makes images, not bootable CDs/DVDs. What is your full-backup/bootable system strategy, something, if possible, as easy/straightforward as mklivecd?
I'm a long time user of Debian, but I'm having trouble with my partitioning process. Here is where I currently stand:
I am installing the latest Wheezy build. I am trying to install debian with an encrypted LVM that spans two hard disks.
My partitioning layout is as:
1. /home 2. /root 3. swap 4. /boot
I then added partitions 1, 2 and 3 to a physical volume group. I then took that physical volume group and added it to a logical volume. Then I encrypted the logical volume, leaving the /boot partition untouched. I was under the assumption that the only partition the system needed free to reach the loading of the LVM is the /boot partition, as it holds the files necessary for booting. But when I attempt to finalize the disk, it gives an error stating, "No root file system detected". That would be an issue as it is currently sitting inside the encrypted LV. Am I wrong in including the root partition in the encrypted LV?
What is the best way of having as little of my file system non-encrypted as possible while still allowing a proper boot?
I was wondering if I could make logical / partitions if I have a primary /boot partition. Is this a potential way to get around having only 4 bootable operating systems on a single HD?
Is there any possibility to move my already installed ubuntu linux to the usb flash and make it bootable. So that it would boot on the other machine?I have an installed ubuntu karmic linux installed on my machine. I want to make it portable, to move it with all installed packages and tuned software to a usb-flash drive.
I want to make a live USB drive, perhaps even 1 with its own GRUB and a choice of operating systems..Its 16gb so it will fit..or maybe just install multiple desktop environments so I can switch depending on the resoruces of the computer I am using..Gnome>E17>LXDE.But I want it to be a regular account with a root/administrator password, ect. When I use the Startup disk creator or Unetbootin I find that the results are pretty limited. I might as well be using a live CD, but thats not ideal. Alternately, when I just install normally it doesnt always load, even when I hit F8 and tell it to boot from my USB drive.Knoppix based distros seem to work better than Ubuntu based distros in this regard, but I dont want Knoppix I want Ubuntu/Mint and friends.Finally, I have sometimes been having problems 'mounting' or using 'swapon'. Even when I turn on Swap with Gparted Im still not getting the benefit of the large swap area I have created..is this because of how the operating system uses swap? Is there a live distro that will save files and settings to swap before using up ram, by default? If not, is there a way to change the behavior of Ubuntu Live CD?
Is there a reason why we cant make proper paragraphs? Is this site strapped for bandwidth or something? Is the site just acting funny?
I just brought a netbook(1005HA) and wanted to try out Ubuntu netbook remix 10.04 but I clean installed it.I like it but there are programs on Windows that I need to use for my HD2. My friend put a windows 7 .iso file on the netbook and I transferred the image to my USB drive to make a bootable USB but it does not boot. install Windows 7 from a USB using Ubuntu correctly?
I had a dual boot on my dell mini inspiron for win xp and linux debian. Due to some issue with windows, I needed to reinstall it and remove debian. From within debian's inbuilt GParted, I deleted the partition containing windows, and now my system will not load any bootable CD (whether winXp or Gparted live cd). Everytime I restart the system with a bootable Cd, it still takes me into debian automatically.how to reformat my hard drive by deleting linux partitions and re-install winxp from bootable cd.
I am attempting to PXE boot Redhat 5.4 and load the OS into RAM. Here is how far I have gotten so far:
I have successfully configured my DHCP, TFTP, and PXE servers. The PC that is booting up Redhat 5.4 is able to get a DHCP IP address from the server, grab the kernel and initrd from the TFTP server, and boot up from there. I have this setup working if I store the root file system on a NFS share on the server and use the kernel's NFSROOT parameter. Long story short, I now need to get this same setup working without using NFS if possible. I have spent several hours google searching how to create a RAM disk (initrd) that also contains the root file system. I must be searching the wrong keywords. Anyway, based on what I have read so far, I need to do the following:
1. I need to pass different kernel parameters. It needs to look something like:
2. It seems like newer versions of initrd are created using the cpio tool. So would this simply be a matter of booting to my hard drive that has Redhat 5.4 loaded on it and running:
To create the RAM disk with a root file system attached to it? I have a feeling it has to be more complicated than that but I just cannot find any sites that specifically explain what would be involved with creating an initrd file that can also be used as the root file system.
3. Would I need to modify the init script (many sites call it "linuxrc") at all in order to accomplish what I want to do? For example, I found this site:[url]
My understanding of this page is that you have to create a linuxrc script that basically does the work of decompressing the file system into /dev/ram0 and mounting it to /root. Is something like this actually needed?
4. The kernel must have certain parameters set such as enabling RAM disk support.
I have most of this setup working. I just need to figure out how to basically store the contents of the OS on the TFTP server and then tell the kernel to load that OS into memory. Based on what I have read, this should be possible (otherwise, how do Live CD's work?).
I am running 8.10 desktop on an MSI Wind desktop. Everything is on the single 500GB hard drive. I also have a 4GB CompactFlash card in the system that has a working version of 8.04 desktop on it. I would like remove 8.04 from the CF card and copy/clone the currently configured 8.10 onto it as a backup just in case I accidentally trash the 8.10 installation on the HDD some time. I'd also like to be able to update the CF backup easily periodically to keep it current with the setup running off the HDD.
The HDD is partitioned as follows.
Code: ken@pinot:~$ df Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/sdb2 9843308 800448 8542840 9% / tmpfs 1032220 0 1032220 0% /lib/init/rw
I am interested in making the root file system is read-only. I've moved /var and /tmp file systems to another partitions. There are two files in the /etc directory that need to be writable.
These are:
I've moved this files to /var and linked it. I've added command to the /etc/rc.d/rc.local file:
That's it. Are there other solutions to make the root file system is read-only?
I have a system built and running in exactly the basic configuration I want, with my recompiled kernel, extra packages, special drivers, everything works, life is good. What I want to do is take this exact setup and create an image I can copy onto a bootable USB stick. Is there a way to essentially take the contents of my hard drive and copy that onto a USB stick and then boot directly from that? The use case behind this is that I am building an embedded system of which I may have hundreds of boxes with identical hardware and software configurations. Instead of hard drives, I am going to use USB sticks for cost efficiency and maintenance. My idea is that when it's time to upgrade, I could just image a hundred new sticks and go out and swap them.
My issue is that a standard LiveCD install gets me maybe 25% of the way to a finished system. I need to recompile the kernel for realtime support with my CPU, add some fidgety drivers for some specific hardware, and install a whole bunch of additional packages. I suppose I could create a makefile(s) to replicate all the manual steps of the buildout but that seems like a lot of unnecessary complexity IF I can just image that running system as it is.
All of my PCs are set up to either run Ubuntu directly, or are dual boot Ubuntu and some variant of Windows. One of the things I like about this is that in the rare instances that I get a virus I can simply boot into Ubuntu and run ClamAV to remove the virus from there.
I have a friend who recently picked up a nasty virus and we are having a hard time getting his machine to boot at all without all sort of strange behaviors. Under that scenario I can't trust Wubi to work correctly. Soo....
Is it possible for me to create a bootable CD, DVD or USB drive from my machine? I'd like to use my machine because I can update the virus definitions before I create the image and then use that to clean his machine.
The only user that can make the sound card work on a F10 x86_64 system is root. For non root users, I am not seeing any error messages when a app tries to use/access the sound card, just nothing plays. As I said, for root everything works as expected. I am sure this is a permission/setup issue, but I have no idea where to start.
