TIP Imaging with a LiveCD

From Gentoo Linux Wiki

This article is part of the Imaging series.

G4U • G4L • yagi • UDPcast • LiveCD

1 Introduction
2 Assumptions
3 Imaging
4 Ponderment
5 See Also

[edit] Introduction

I've been using G4U happily to do all of the imaging at VUHS, however, 3 major issues (Dell Gx280's) arrived via FedEx not too long ago which required an alternative method.

The first issue was that they have SATA drives. Luckily, with a little googling, I found out that there is a compatibility mode for PATA in the BIOS.

G4U 2.0 has SATA support, but it doesn't include support for usb keyboards.
G4L suffers from the same problem.

I ended up using a Gentoo 2005.0 livecd and putting the keyboard in one of the two ports nearest the network card (the other ones seemed to work coldplugged only every other boot but worked hotplugged after startup just fine ???). The driver for the SATA on a dell gx280 is ata_piix.

[edit] Assumptions

SERVER=10.0.0.11
HOST="10.0.0.100
TARGET=10.0.0.101

Server exports /var/ftp/ via NFS
Host is Running from Knoppix, Gentoo 2005, or other LiveCD

[edit] Imaging

NOTE: I use grub on all of the machines, windows or linux - it's just easier that way.

Code: Upload image

 modprobe ata-piix
 /etc/init.d/portmap start
 mkdir /mnt/nfsserver
 mount -t nfs 10.0.0.11:/var/ftp /mnt/nfsserver

 dd if=/dev/sda of=/mnt/nfsserver/op_gx280.mbr bs=512 count=1
 dd if=/dev/sda1 | gzip -c > /mnt/nfsserver/op_gx280.sda1.gz
 dd if=/dev/sda2 bs=8M | gzip -c > /mnt/nfsserver/op_gx280.sda2.gz

Boot up your next machine and image it

Code: Download Image

 modprobe ata-piix
 /etc/init.d/portmap start
 mkdir /mnt/nfsserver
 mount -t nfs 10.0.0.11:/var/ftp /mnt/nfsserver

 dd if=/mnt/nfsserver/op_gx280.mbr of=/dev/sda
 gunzip /mnt/nfsserver/op_gx280.sda1.gz -c | dd of=/dev/sda1
 gunzip /mnt/nfsserver/op_gx280.sda2.gz -c | dd of=/dev/sda2 bs=8M