Disk images with dd

[Antony Gelberg]

Daniel Carrera wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> Alright, I've made an OEM installation I'm happy with. The next step is
> to make a disk image, and figure out how to apply it to other disks.
> 
> 1) Make a disk image:
> This is the easy part.
> 
> dd if=/dev/hda1 | gzip -c > ubuntu_oem.img.gz
> 
> 2) Put the image into another hard disk.
> This is the hard part.
> 
> gzip -c -d < ubuntu_oem.img.gz | dd of=/dev/hdb1
> 
> Questions:
> * What if the partition hdb1 is not identical to hda1?

Indeed.  You have made a partiton image by the way, not a disk image.
dd is not necessarily the best tool for this.

> * I still need to make the swap by hand with fdisk, right?
> * What about the MBR in hdb? (remember, hdb is destined for another
> computer).
> 
> Help?

You can use aptitude (or apt-cache) to search the package repository.
aptitude search image reveals (amongst other thing) systemimager.  You
might like it.