I have a tested copy of EL6 that I would like to duplicate to a number of similar servers, but can't seem to find a sane howto on the subject. TLDP's "Hard disk upgrade howto" is embarrassingly antiquated: when's the last time you saw LILO? What's the recommended procedure for doing an HDD copy/upgrade from one disk to another? Is there a nice, detailed howto that explains this in detail? My set up is pretty straight forward. My partitions are all set up as simple partitions, with UUID's in /etc/fstab. I'm not using LVM or RAID. Any ideas? -Ben -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/attachments/20110729/3df11f5d/attachment-0001.html>
On 7/29/11 9:45 PM, Benjamin Smith wrote:> I have a tested copy of EL6 that I would like to duplicate to a number of > similar servers, but can't seem to find a sane howto on the subject. TLDP's > "Hard disk upgrade howto" is embarrassingly antiquated: when's the last time you > saw LILO? > > > What's the recommended procedure for doing an HDD copy/upgrade from one disk to > another? Is there a nice, detailed howto that explains this in detail? > > > My set up is pretty straight forward. My partitions are all set up as simple > partitions, with UUID's in /etc/fstab. I'm not using LVM or RAID.If the machines are pretty much identical, clonezilla should work. Boot the machine with a 'clonezilla-live' CD or USB drive. If you can attach the target drive to the same machine you can go disk->disk. Otherwise, connect to something on the network with enough space to hold the image (ssh, nfs, or a windows share) and clone disk->image, then boot the target machines and copy image->disk. There is also a server version that will pxe-boot the targets if you need to do a large number of them. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com
At Fri, 29 Jul 2011 19:45:42 -0700 CentOS mailing list <centos at centos.org> wrote:> > > > I have a tested copy of EL6 that I would like to duplicate to a number of > similar servers, but can't seem to find a sane howto on the subject. TLDP's > "Hard disk upgrade howto" is embarrassingly antiquated: when's the last time > you saw LILO?*I* still use LILO, even with my CentOS 5.6 systems.> > What's the recommended procedure for doing an HDD copy/upgrade from one disk > to another? Is there a nice, detailed howto that explains this in detail?http://www.deepsoft.com/2009/01/how-to-transfer-a-linux-system-from-one-disk-to-another/> > My set up is pretty straight forward. My partitions are all set up as simple > partitions, with UUID's in /etc/fstab. I'm not using LVM or RAID. > > Any ideas? > > -Ben >-- Robert Heller -- 978-544-6933 / heller at deepsoft.com Deepwoods Software -- http://www.deepsoft.com/ () ascii ribbon campaign -- against html e-mail /\ www.asciiribbon.org -- against proprietary attachments
On Saturday, July 30, 2011 11:18:34 AM Robert Heller wrote:> dd can be problematic if the target and source disks are different > (sizes, geometry, etc.), since dd will do a literal sector-by-sector > copy, which is not generally advisable (and why o why to people *keep* > suggesting it? -- it is really a misuse of dd, unless you *really* know > what you are doing).Geometry on an LBA device should not be an issue. If it is an issue, that is a bug, since it is impossible to specify the actual geometry of the disk, even if the manufacturer makes that information available due to varying numbers of sectors per track across the platters. CHS geometry is an archaic thing. For direct clones dd and its variants work well, and get data that isn't in any filesystem or partition (boot loaders, in particular, often use the space before the first partition on the disk). The default upstream EL6.1 install leaves a full megabyte in front of the first partition; some bootloaders and other utilities use this space. Things like Dell's MediaDirect, for instance..... and that's but one example. Restore partitions (not just for Windows; Dell systems with Ubuntu preinstalled have them, and extended MBR boot sectors to handle them (LBA 3 is a common place to put the 'extended' boot loader for such things)). And that's part of the reason I'll use dd or a variant (ddrescue or dd_rescue, etc) if doing a clone to a disk of the same size or larger. Then I can resize partitions as needed for the larger disk using any one of a number of tools for the job.
On Friday 29 July 2011 22:45, Benjamin Smith wrote:> I have a tested copy of EL6 that I would like to duplicate to a > number of similar servers, but can't seem to find a sane howto on the > subject. TLDP's "Hard disk upgrade howto" is embarrassingly > antiquated: when's the last time you saw LILO?When I wrote that How-To, I wanted to copy Linux from a 120 Mb hard disk to a 250 Mb hard disk. I've thought about updating the How-To, but I assumed that modern hard disks are so large that people no longer needed to copy Linux just because they ran out of disk space. Even back then, the How-To wasn't intended for someone who wanted to make several copies. As others have suggested, Clonezilla seems appropriate for your situation: http://clonezilla.org/ I still use LILO to boot from thumb drives, by the way. Yves -- Yves Bellefeuille <yan at storm.ca> "La Esperanta Civito ne rifuzas anticipe la kunlaboron de erarintoj, se ili konscias pri sia eraro." -- Heroldo Komunikas, n-ro 473.