OEM hard disk replication

[Preston Hagar]

On Tue, Mar 2, 2010 at 10:43 AM, Chadley Wilson <chadleyw at pinnacle.co.za> wrote:
> Hi All,
> Really stuck, will try and be descriptive a short so that you understand my
> situation.
>
> I work for a major South African PC manufacturer, and I have been trying to
> play with the OEM boot option. With no success! J
>
> I can duplicate a hard drive at approximately 5 GB per minute using our
> fancy Wytron duplicators. The problem is that the duplicated hard disks only
> work if we plug them into the original machine. What we call a master.
>
> Now we can’t afford 15 minutes to load each PC from CD or network, as our
> deadlines are far too tight.
>
>
> Is there a  tool, a read me or something in the Ubuntu arsenal of gadgets
> that can get my next 5000 computers loaded with Ubuntu using disk
> duplication and hard disk imaging.
>
> If anyone here has accomplished this before, or has successfully created an
> image file and used it on a different PC, please can you tell me how you did
> it?
>
>
> PS:
>
> Just a note for the amateurs in the list, if you suggest that I load from a
> CD I will swear at you. J
>
> Regards
>
> Chad
>

You may be in too much of a hurry to answer this (please don't swear
at me), but what exactly fails when you put the duplicated disks in
another machine?  I have actually put disks with Ubuntu installs on
them from one machine to a different machine, with different hardware
(motherboard, RAM, etc) and as long as the processor architecture was
the same (i386, amd64, etc) it would boot and work with usually no
problem (the only issues were things like switching from an ATI to
NVIDIA video card and wanting to use the proprietary drivers, they
would still have to be manually installed).

Anyway, assuming that your "next 5000 computers" are identical
hardware, it makes me wonder what is exactly going wrong when the
cloned disk is put in a "blank" machine.  I haven't honestly ever used
the OEM login/install option.  From the looks of things, it is more or
less a normal install that auto-creates an "oem" user that is then
removed once you do oem-config-prepare which sets a config wizard type
thing to come up on the next boot to set regional settings and create
a user account.

What version of Ubuntu are you using?  What, if any, are the
significant differences between your "master" machines and the other
machines?  Have you tried using one of the 5000 non-masters, creating
the install and image on it, and then clone it to the other 4999
machines?

If your duplicator does a true byte for byte copy, and the hardware is
even close to the same, I can't see why that wouldn't work.  Most of
the hardware detection in Linux is done at boot and not stored (for
example, the xorg.conf file has almost all but gone away for
"standard" configurations).

I know I may have just asked more questions than answered any, and
someone might come along and say that I am totally wrong, but in my
(admittedly small scale) experience, there has been no issues from
using the image of one machine on another as long as the processor
architecture is the same and no special settings or configurations
have to be created.

Preston