Disk images

[Daniel Carrera]

Hello,

I've been working more on getting disk images, and it's not very 
straight forward. All the software available seems designed for data 
recovery, whereas what I want to do is copy a disk image onto an 
entirely new disk.

First, the use scenario:
------------------------
An OEM wants to sell computers with Ubuntu Linux pre-installed. They 
setup one computer with Ubuntu's OEM installation. Then they make an 
image of that computer's disk and put it on many computers to sell.

Attempted solutions:
--------------------
1) A first attempt was to use 'dd'.
dd if=/dev/hda of=oem_ubuntu.img

Then put that image on every other disk. This doesn't work because the 
other disks are not necessarily identical. In fact, they generally 
aren't, they're just "similar". I tried this and the only part that 
worked was the MBR. Even if this worked, we're talking about several 
hours of copy time because dd copies all the 0 bytes.

2) Next attempt is to use partimage.

Partimage actually understands the filesystem and makes an image of the 
actual files inside a partition. This has the advantage that it can deal 
with different disk geometries and disk sizes. The problem now is that 
partimage doesn't create partitions, and it doesn't copy the MBR, so the 
machine won't boot.

3) Next attempt: a combination of dd and partimage
Use dd to make an image of the MBR and partimage for the filesystem.

This is an improvement. But the MBR also includes partition information, 
not just the bootloader. And the partition information may not be 
applicable (different disk geometry). Also, we still need to actually 
create and format those partitions.

4) Next attempt:  ??????? (suggestions?)

I'm thinking that I might use fdisk to create the partitions. And 
perhaps use mke2fs too. But I still need a boot loader on the MBR. So 
one option is:

* Use 'dd' to copy the bootloader.
* Then use fdisk to create/fix the partitions.

But this means that fdisk will have to fix a broken partition table. I 
don't know if that would work.

Another issue is that fdisk is an interactive program. I'd need a 
non-interactive counterpart so I can write a script that automates all 
of this.

If anyone has any ideas, please give a shout.

Cheers,
Daniel.
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