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I am looking for a solution how to duplicate a Linux installation for multiple systems. The Linux installation is based on openSUSE 12.2. All systems use the absolute identical hardware.

The official solution would be to use AutoYaST (see http://doc.opensuse.org/projects/autoyast/). But since all systems use the same hardware I was thinking about taking an disk-image from an installation and "dd" to all new systems? What do you think, any best practices?

Friedrich
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  • This seems [off-topic for Stack Overflow](http://stackoverflow.com/faq#questions). You might want to ask about this on [Server Fault](http://serverfault.com), [Unix.SE](http://unix.stackexchange.com), or [Super User](http://superuser.com) (but search for it there first!). – Eliah Kagan Mar 19 '13 at 15:26

3 Answers3

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try using the parted or gparted applications. gparted is the GUI for parted.

http://www.gnu.org/software/parted/manual/html_chapter/parted_8.html

cmevoli
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    parted can be used to copy the image from one drive to another to achieve what he's asking. How does that have nothing to do with the question? – cmevoli Mar 04 '13 at 17:43
  • Yeah, you can copy partitions, but what he's looking for is a disk imaging tool. I doubt he'll be attaching all the hard drives to the same machine. – carlspring Mar 04 '13 at 17:45
  • Right. You have proven me wrong, my apologies. When did they add this? – carlspring Mar 04 '13 at 17:51
  • Not sure when it was added but I use it for imaging small itx-based machines with barebones opensuse installs. – cmevoli Mar 04 '13 at 17:53
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I am sure there are better ways to do this than dd. I tried that some ten years ago on identical machines and it did work, but was slow. I believe nowadays it makes more sense to be using tools like:

  • Partimage. I tried this a while ago and it was quite good.

  • Clonezilla. I've only heard it does the job, but have no observations of my own.

For more info, check this link.

carlspring
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dd will work, but is very slow because you'll have to copy over the whole disk, not just the data. I install hundreds of systems all the time and use SALI and System Imager. I use SALI to actually install the images and System Imager to manage variations of hardware and images. There's several ways to do it in SALI, but the standard method is via a pxeboot loader. But that's not required.

gogators
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