Somewhat OT: cloning hard disks

[Alex Snow]

In this situation I have about 10 machines that are getting cloned 
from one master, with DD taking about an hour to do each machine.  The 
machines are all spare, so it's not a matter of tying up a 
workstation, but getting things done quickly.
On 
Wed, Sep 24, 2008 at 11:47:10AM -0400, Janina Sajka wrote:
> I'm still a fan of dd for such tasks.
> 
> You mention speed, but I wonder why that should be an issue. Even if dd
> is slow, are you actually doing so many disks over so many days, weeks,
> and months that it really matters? Or, maybe you're worried about tyeing
> up your only workstation? In wich case I'd just do it overnight.
> 
> Janina
> 
> Alex Snow writes:
> > Hi,
> > Was just given the task of cloning several machines from a master that I 
> > installed.  THe master has both Windows XP and Ubuntu 8.04 installed.  
> > What's the best way to make an image of this drive so it can be copied 
> > to several other drives? I was thinking of just using DD, but is there 
> > any faster way? partimage looked interesting, but it looked like a pain 
> > to clone an entire disk (doing it one partition at a time, then losing 
> > the MBR from the original drive).
> > Also looked at clonezilla which looked somewhat promising (it uses a 
> > console interface so could have speakup integrated into it), but I was 
> > unable to find any source (or even a copy of the kernel config so I 
> > could recompile)
> > Any advice would be greatly apreciated.
> > 
> > -- 
> > lp1 on fire
> > 	-- One of the more obfuscated kernel messages
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> > http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
> 
> -- 
> 
> Janina Sajka,	Phone:	+1.202.595.7777;	sip:janina at a11y.org
> Partner, Capital Accessibility LLC	http://CapitalAccessibility.Com
> 
> Marketing the Owasys 22C talking screenless cell phone in the U.S. and Canada
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> 
> Chair, Open Accessibility	janina at a11y.org	
> Linux Foundation		http://a11y.org
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-- 
Now, it we had this sort of thing:
  yield -a     for yield to all traffic
  yield -t     for yield to trucks
  yield -f     for yield to people walking (yield foot)
  yield -d t*  for yield on days starting with t

...you'd have a lot of dead people at intersections, and traffic jams you
wouldn't believe...
	-- Discussion on the intuitiveness of commands