Dear Mr. Till Kamppeter,
Your Solution appears fine for a networked environment. But How do I do a
DiskCopy? In Windows, I set up a secondary master, format it, and use
Diskcopy c: d: /e/c/q/h/r/y from dos box. The resulting disk when installed
in the new system does not boot, so I set the bootable patron from Fdisk and
the system is fully replicated. All program files & settings work. Is there
any such DISKDUMP facility from hda to hdb in LINUX?
Sunil Gupta
LinkWorld.
Till Kamppeter wrote:
> The best is Kickstart, but when it is not possible to use it (too
> different machines, distro w/o Kickstart) I do more or less the
> following:
>
> Prepare the copying:
>
> - Install one machine completely and make a boot disk for it
> - Connect the installed machine to your local network
>
> Do this for every copy copy:
>
> - Connect a second PC with blank HD to your network
> - Boot the machine with a rescue CD (CD of MDK 7.1, or SuSE, or some
> of these credit-card rescue CDs which you get on every Linux fair.
> - partition the harddisk with 'fdisk' and format it with 'mkfs' and
> 'mkswap'.
> - Make it known for the first machine by entering it in roots
> .rhosts,
> /etc/hosts and /etc/hosts.equiv
> - Get access to the network entering
>
> hostname [your hostname]
> ifconfig eth0 inet [your IP] netmask [your netmask]
> route add default gw [your gateway IP]
>
> - Test the access with 'netstat -nr', 'ping [IP of first PC]'
> - Make mountpoints and mount all disk partitions, so that the later
> root directory will be /mnt.
> - Copy the 'root' partition
>
> cd /mnt
> rsh [IP of first PC] '(tar -cvplf - /)' | tar -xvpf -
>
> - Copy the other partitions
>
> cd /mnt
> rsh [IP of first PC] '(cd / ; tar -cvplf - usr)' | tar -xvpf -
> cd /mnt/usr
> rsh [IP of first PC] '(cd /usr ; tar -cvplf - local)' | tar
> -xvpf -
> cd ..
>
> - Adapt the configuration files (they are in /mnt/etc/... now) and
> edit /mnt/etc/inittab to start in a non-graphical run mode.
> - Boot the PC with the boot disk of the first PC, ignore all error
> messages.
> - Edit /etc/lilo.conf end enter 'lilo' to make the PC bootable.
> - Configure sound, graphics, network, printers, and so on with the
> Maandrake tools.
> - Boot the PC and all should work.
>
> Link World wrote:
> >
> > I am a system OEM in Bangalore,India selling systems bundled with
> > Mandrake Linux. The problem is that with every system I sell, I need to
> > install & configure the system which takes HOURS!. Can I do a diskcopy
> > instead?
> >
> > Please Help. This is a major bottleneck for me.
> >
> > SUNIL GUPTA
> > LinkWorld.
