Can I take an image from a flash drive and put it onto another drive

euser1984

Basically, I have a few machines with the exact same hardware and want to use the same config across them all.

One of them is setup now (Xubuntu), do I need to set them all from scratch or can I copy the persistence file or something?

Thanks.

AnCatDubh

em... probably lots of ways, two ideas (sure that others will have more ways)

I think the unix/linux dd command could/should do what you are asking. I remember coming across a great tutorial but damned if I can remember where (be very careful with the if and of parameters though)

Also, check out clonezilla. This definitely will do what you are trying to do.

croo

You can buy hardware specifically for this too ... like
I'm not recommending this one specifically or even the vendor - it was just an example.

Anytime I cloned disks it was a once off so I just used clonezilla as AnCatDubh suggested and it worked without issue. I recently discovered GParted will also allow you to copy & paste (CTRL-C & CTRL-V) partitions and that works surprising well too!

With linux the two machines don't even need to be that similar - a couple of years ago I got a new laptop and, just out of curiosity, removed the HDD from the old and popped it into the new laptop - windows wouldn't boot but linux boot up .. mentioned that some hardware had changed then proceeded to run - I never had problems with it! In the end I left it.

But if you had a lot of disks to copy the duplicating devices might be useful!?

syklops

dd if=/source/drive of=/destination/drive

Simples.

euser1984

Cheers, just wasn't sure how the MBR worked on pen drives.

Stuxnet

remastersys is good also, will clone and make an installable iso of your current setup

niallb

If you're using an ubuntu style installation, you should take a look at the directory

/etc/udev/rules.d

and delete the persistent rules files in there, particularly the persistent-net.rules before you make your image.
They will be recreated next time you boot.

If you don't you'll wonder why your clones don't have an eth0 or even an eth1 device, and start up with confused networks
as eth0 will be assigned to the MAC address of the net card in the original machine.

euser1984

Thanks a million for the help.

human 19

You have not mentoioned partitions so I assume you are using the whole disk. You will still need to install grub in the MBR

The easiest (clonezilla was mentioned , but the following is easier and better for future saving of partitions) is qt4-fsarchiver.

Basically its a 600mb ubuntiu based distro with a gui for fsarchiver which saves partitions. Unlike clonezilla, it doesnt also save the blank spaces but just the data. I tried clonezilla once, got an unspecified error whrn trying to reinstall and havent touched it since.

I use qt4-fsarchiver to back up my 2 main distros before updating every couple of weeks. Done it loads of times without any problems,both saving and restoring once or twice. Takes 10 mins approx to save or restore a standard partition

the last time I wiped my HDD as a cleanup, I had saved my partititions, set up new partitions with a partition manager and then simply restored them to the new partitions with qt4-fsa. Then used a live cd to install grub to MBR. That was all.

By the way, I had this qts-fsarchiver installed onto a "Multisystem" USB stick which beats the hell out of both burning a disk or using unetbootin. By installing multisystem onto a usb stick from an ubuntu-based system you can have various recovery or other small (puppy) distros which can be run by booting from a USB stick, as opposed to unetbootin which only installs one

http://sourceforge.net/projects/qt4-fsarchiver/

http://sourceforge.net/projects/multisystem/