Some Advice needed on cloning a Server

[jbarry]

Hi all;

I am currently tasked to implement and maintain a School LTSP.
Installation went smoothly, but then when time comes to run the thing
we have problems when students simultaneously run either of the
following Tuxpaint, Tuxmath, childsplay and Gcompris and also the
Client Manager gives us problems. clients will hangup and the server
will crawl.

We also have sound problems for Flash and Java games on web-pages (the
Lab doubles as an Internet Cafe after school hours so these two are
essential).

here is my specs:

Server: AMD Athlon X2 running Edubuntu (32 bit) 7.04
  Dual Gigabit Nvidia Network card (unfortunately, there is a bug with
running this card in Giga mode so I have to run it in 100mbps)
memory: 2Gig
Harddisk: 120 Gig SATA

Number of Clients: 26
Specs: AMD Sempron 2600+ with 512mb of memory.

My superior is thinking of just buying harddisks for the clients so
they become full pledge workstations, and I'm thinking that would be a
lot of work esp. in installing and maintaining software, so advice for
cloning workstations is also appreciated.

While my "solution" is to try and make Fat-clients work since I think
the clients can really handle it (except the netwok bottle neck
thing). So LDAP + NFS.

While I have read from this list a lot of discussion about LDAP I am
afraid to try it on our production server, so as my windows upbringing
thought me I used ghost to clone the server into an identical disk.

but when I booted that disk the display would only say

GRUB

and nothing else. So maybe it cannot see the partitions since 7.04
uses UUID in fstab, so I edited those also in the GRUB's menu.lst but
it wont still bootup. What did I miss?

here is the partitioning scheme

/dev/sda3    as /
/dev/sda1    as /boot
/dev/sda4    as /home
/dev/sda2    as swap

I need to clone the server so that I can easily try out the FAT-client
setup and pullback to the original disk when things go bonkers.

hope I am clear in my words and somebody will help out.

thanks!!

jBarry