Ubuntu Installation :: Creating An Exact Image Of A Hard Disk?
Sep 8, 2010
this is in the wrong section, but I wasn't sure where to put it. Since the background to my problem is kind of long winded I've split this post into two sections: Short version of problem
I have a PC that has two internal drives: one drive (drive A) is empty, and the other (drive B) has a copy of windows vista installed. At the moment the PC boots from drive A. I'd like to transfer everything from drive A to drive B, so that this new disk will boot and behave nicely and windows will still function.
Is there any easy way to do this in ubuntu? I'm guessing I can use something like dd, but will this copy the boot sector and will I have to mess around with the partition table? Long version of the problem
Today I built a new PC for my dad with two internal drives. He was previously using vista on a laptop which died a few days ago, and I'd like to install vista on one disk of the new PC, and ubuntu on the other disk.
He has a licensed copy of Vista for his laptop, but it came as a "system restore" disk, and so I can't install vista directly onto the new PC. I have an identical laptop to his, so I took out the drive from his laptop, put it in my laptop, and did a "system restore" from the disk that came with the laptop. I then took out the drive from my laptop, and put this inside the new PC. It boots up fine, and I installed all the necessary drivers and etc to make windows work.
Now instead of using a slow/small laptop drive inside the new PC, I'd like to be able to clone the data on laptop disk and this onto one of the bigger/faster internal drives of the new PC. How can I do this from ubuntu, so that the new drive will boot windows?
I'm fairly certain it can be done using dd, but how do I make sure the information in the boot sector (or partition table) is correct for the new drive? I'm asking this because when I put my laptop drive into the new PC initially, I had connected it as an external drive, and when I tried booting from this there was an error, something like "Invalid partition table" (I think). I figured that when I did a "system restore" on my laptop, the drive was the only drive available, so this would be HDA, or SDA in the boot record of that disk. But when I added it to a system where other drives were available, it was no longer at that same location, so the boot loader couldn't find the data it was looking for to load the system.
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Jul 28, 2010
I am new to the Linux world and I am not sure if what I am trying to do is achievable or not. I am trying to make an image of my existing drives running Linux on a USB and I want to use the same image off the USB to clone more bootable hard drives. Something like what Ghost does in windows. The problem is using 'dd' the image is too big ( I have 1tb drives ) and then I am not sure how to convert these images back on to new drives so that they boot in the OS as well. i am not sure if there is a utility that would let you do that?
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Apr 6, 2010
If you have a hard disk image (including partition table, multiple partitions,...), is it possible to let Linux treat it as a regular hard disk?
By "regular hard disk" I mean I would like to have the image show up as, for instance, /dev/hdx and its partitions as /dev/hdx1,...
(I know I can mount one of the partitions in the image using "mount -o loop,offset=x ..." but I don't really like this option.)
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Mar 8, 2011
I've been out of the Linux loop for a little while, but a customer of mine wants a "No Virus) desktop environment, I have gone through the process of installing and configuring Ubuntu 10.10 to work with their client side software, but for the life of me, I can't remember if or how I can create an exact image of this file-system to install on all of the desktops.I would need to have all of the installed programs, Security Certificates, Display settings... basically, I need exactly what I have right now installed from the disc so that "IF" the customer needs to install the environment on new systems, I can just pop the disc in and run.
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Jun 30, 2010
I am installing Linux on some spare space I left over from my previous two Windows installations.
From within Linux, what's the most risk-free way of imaging these two partitions and saving them to a single image file or archive? I want to preserve the entire partition because I have no idea what I may have forgotten to copy. What is the most suitable program that can do this?
Is there any way to run the partition in a virtual machine at a later date?
After this is done, I want to delete those old partitions and extend my Linux ones.
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Jul 28, 2010
I am trying to create a bootable USB drive. I go to System > Administration > Startup Disk Creator and click on 'Other' as the image I want to use is not listed. I then find the Chrome OS image and double click but then I return to the Disk Creator and it is still not listed as the source disk.
So does anybody know how to get around this so I can use this program to create a bootable USB drive, or another way that I can create one? I have used the Disk Creator to create a bootable version of Jolicloud (which is probably one of the worst Linux distros out there) before, but now it won't work.
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Oct 7, 2009
however, I couldn't find a place in which it would really fit well. I have 2 hard drives, that I want to backup. I've heard of servers and things like that using a hard drive image. Is this similar to a disk image? What are the benefits of using hard drive imaging as opposed to using DVDs? And perhaps most importantly: how would I go about it using Fedora 10 (64 bit)?
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Aug 6, 2011
Could anyone recommend a method of creating a full disk image. I have the Acronis bootable media, would this work to backup Linux partitions? I'm thinking that Acronis doesn't know or care what is written to the disk as it works at a lower level.
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May 22, 2011
is there a way to write/unpack .qcow2 hard disk image directly to real hard drive in Linux?(I know it's possible to unpack .qcow2 to .raw and then dd to drive, but I'd like to skip .raw since its large)
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Dec 22, 2008
How to create a bootable cd/dvd from downloaded iso images of CentOS 5? I have collected all the iso in a dvd but it is not booting the system.
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May 31, 2011
When I try to burn an ISO to a DVD it goes okay but when it's finalizing it says:
Creating image checksum
And then it just freezes.
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Oct 27, 2010
We have some servers that run in very harsh environments (research vessel) that need to have high-availability.We have software RAID 1 for some measure of resiliency, along with proper data backups (tapes etc), however we would like to be able to break out a new server and re-image it (including RAID setup) from a known good copy if the hardware completely fails on the production box. Simplicity of the process is a big plus.I am interested in any advice on the best way to approach this. My current approach (relatively new to Linux administration, totally new to MDADM) is to use DD to take a complete gzipped copy of one of the RAID'ed devices (from a live CD): ode:
dd if=/dev/sda bs=4096 | gzip -c > /mnt/external/image/test.img then reverse the process on the new PC, finally using Code:mdadm --assemble to re-create and re-build the array.
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Sep 23, 2010
I want to copy hard disk have ubuntu 10.04 and ext4 to 1000 hard disk for new 1000
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May 17, 2010
How to boot an iso image from hard disk. I have created a linux live cd with remastersys. I want to test it. So I want to boot it from my hard disk.
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Jan 5, 2010
After I burn the DVD image, I put the disc on the computer and boot. The installation screen appears, the acknowledgement screen appears, then the installation checks my system and gives me a yast window with an error about something related to URLs and repositories. I cannot continue with the installation.
I am 100% new at this and thought it would be as easy as installing ubuntu (which I installed on a laptop and works flawlessly).I am trying distros and opensuse is compatible with my video card right out of the box apparently, so that's why I chose it for my desktop.Do I need to copy the dvd image to the hard disk of the computer I want to install opensuse on, and use the dvd to boot as well?
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Jun 17, 2011
I'd like to create a boot floppy or CD to restore an image from a harddisk over the network, and it should work possibly automatically.
A normal, non-IT user should be able to do it in our branch abroad.
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Nov 7, 2010
I just invested nearly 12 hours configuring a CCTV system using CentOS 5.5 Server and Zoneminder. I have it setup just the way I want it. I would like to make a clone image of the drive just in case disaster strikes (lightning strike, failed hard disk, etc). In the Windows PC world, I use a program called Ghost to make a mirror image of a hard disk. I power the computer down, run Ghost to make a block level clone of the drive, then power it back up. Can I assume that will work with CentOS without problem?
In the computer now is a 320GB SATA drive. One partition on it is swap, and the other is ext3. There is no raid setup on the drive. I have an identical 320GB drive I could use and keep it in the computer unplugged from the power and not spinning. That way if anything ever happens, I can power down, move the power and data cable to the new drive and power it back up. Granted, I will lose any new config and database changes, but it will be a lot better than starting back at square 1 and reconfiguring the entire OS and software.
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Jan 13, 2011
I am looking for an Open Source software making it possible to make a disk image of an Ubuntu installation as well as a Windows XP installation.I have checked out Clonezilla which almost solved the problem. However, the disk to which you restore needs to be the same size or bigger. I want to restore the whole thingo a smaller disk than the original.I am considering getting myself an SSD disk which will be considerably smaller than the 160 gb disk I have right now. I need it to work for Windows as well. Unfortunately I can't get rid of Windows quite yet I often participate in webinars on GotoWebinar and they do not support Linux ...
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Feb 26, 2010
I remember, long ago when I used Linux, that I was able to launch a terminal, or any other program at that and have the ability to pass exactly where on my desktop I want it to appear. I would do this by placing some arguments in the applications launcher like
--title=TITLE
Does anyone know how to do this, I'd like to be able to launch a few different terminals, with different profiles and have them default to certain locations on my desktop/work area.
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Feb 22, 2011
I want to delete the KVM created hard disk image file, so I would like to know where it is located .
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Jul 18, 2011
I'm trying to install debian-6.0.2.1 from hard diskand it can't find my iso image wich is on the slackware partition.i downloaded initrd.gz an vmlinuz,added some lines to lilo.conf so that i can boot but then when it searches for the iso image doesn't find it .
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Jul 20, 2010
I have a dvd I want to boot from, on a certain laptop. The problem is this:
DVD will NOT boot in laptop [1] with this DVD.
DVD WILL boot ok in laptop [2] with this DVD.
- Conclusion, DVD is ok.
* laptop [1] and laptop [2] boots other media in the cd/dvd drive ok.
I can see all files on DVD in both laptops. As a workaround I copied the DVD image off the DVD drive to internal hard disk with following command and the result was as follows:
- result of dd command
# dd if=/dev/sr0 of=/dev/sda4
6298816+0 records in
6298816+0 records out
3224993792 bytes (3.2 GB) copied, 473.18 s, 6.8 MB/s
How do I make that partition [/dev/sda4] bootable ?
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Feb 27, 2011
I would like to build a bootable system image on an attached hard disk on a running CentOS machine.The hard disk would be moved to a headless server, where only SSH access would be available. It seems that all the documented install methods assume that the installation runs on the taget machine. In this case, I would like to create a bootable system image of CentOS on a running host system. The new install mage would generally have a newer version of CentOS than the running host system where the image is created. Also, I would prefer
to do a text-based install.
The reason for all this is that I have network access to several remote machines. I can ask disks to be moved between machines, but I have no physical access. In order to do software testing, I would like to have several system disks with different installed CentOS versions. It would be easer if I could build the system disks on one single machine. The hardware an all machines is very nearly identical.
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Aug 3, 2010
Whats missing is exact size of image.udf. E.g. what should be exact value of $Z ?
1) dd if=/dev/zero of=image.udf bs=64k seek=$ZZZZZZZZ count=1
2) mount -o loop ./image.udf /mnt/udf
3) write files to /mnt/udf
4) umount /mnt/udf
5) growisofs -speed=8 -Z /dev/scd0=image.udf
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Sep 1, 2010
what is the best software for cloning my centos as an exact image?
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Dec 11, 2010
I'm trying to clone a 2GB USB memory stick to another stick just like it (same size and brand). The src drive has three partitions, one fat, one ext2 and one encrypted (in that order). It also has an mbr. I create the clone using the following command:
dd if=/dev/xxx of=/dev/xxx bs=512k conv=noerror,notrunc
Once it's done the mbr, the ext2 and the encrypted partitions seem fine, but the fat one is slightly modified on the clone. Here is a hex dump of the (broken) clones fat partition followed by a dump of the original partition.
"Clone":
0000000 3ceb 6d90 646b 736f 7366 0000 0402 0001
0000010 0002 0002 f800 00bc 003e 0040 0000 0000
[code]....
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Sep 2, 2010
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.
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May 30, 2010
Best way to do a scheduled backup of a server (PowerPC, Ubuntu 9.10), when an exact copy of the linux partition would be made on a disk of the same size? It seems there are several solution, but I have problems choosing the best.
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Apr 8, 2009
after installing Ubuntu on one WD 500 GB hard disk and after making mistake and pasting wrong code into Terminal:my OTHER WD 500 GB hard disk that was also in the system (I guess it was "hd1") - died.The problem must be, I guess, I typed wrong code: "hd1,1" instead of "hd0,0".)500 GB (NTFS) of data was on that other (non-Ubuntu) hard disk, and now I can not access it anymore. While booting, system gives "Hard Disk Error" warning and stops.One again: I installed Ubuntu od one hard disk and at the end of instalation I pasted wrong code for GRUB, giving address of another hard disk. Now that other hard disk has error and will not work
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Nov 29, 2010
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?
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