Hard drive imaging

[Nicholas Leippe]

On Wednesday 21 June 2006 09:11, Stephen Ward wrote:
> I'm looking for a convenient way to image a single hard drive and then
> deploy it on out to a bunch of other drives with capacity greater than or
> equal to that of the original.
>
> What I've come up with is to use the dd command to rip the raw data off the
> drive and save it to a file.  I'd like to store the file on a large Windows
> share, so I'd probably mount the share with samba and then just tell dd to
> save the file there.  Then to deploy, I'd just do the reverse.
>
> Maybe I'd mix in a little gzip/gunzip piping as well.
>
> Any thoughts?  Is there already some tool out there designed for this that
> would save me a few steps?

You could just export /dev/hdX as an nbd, and on the target machine use dd
to copy it.  That should have far less overhead than smb/cifs.  Even nc should 
out perform smb/cifs.

If you want, you could still image the file and store it on the windows box.  
There is a port of the nbd-server for windows.

-- 
Respectfully,

Nicholas Leippe
Sales Team Automation, LLC
1335 West 1650 North, Suite C
Springville, UT  84663 +1 801.853.4090
http://www.salesteamautomation.com