Disk images with dd

[David Woyciesjes]

Antony Gelberg wrote:
> 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.
> 

	The dd command copies every bit, including empty space. I would use 
something like Norton Ghost or partimge to create an image file of the 
whole drive. Both I believe allow you to increase the size of the 
partitions as you restore the image to a new drive.

-- 
--- Dave Woyciesjes
--- ICQ# 905818
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