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Full Discussion: Automated disk cloning
Special Forums Hardware Filesystems, Disks and Memory Automated disk cloning Post 302378149 by uvaio on Monday 7th of December 2009 04:34:00 AM
Old 12-07-2009
Automated disk cloning
Hi,

I'm running Ubuntu on my laptop. To keep my data safe and easy disaster recovery as well I bought similar HDD to one installed in my laptop with higher capacity and using USB box I'm doing disk clone to it. So at any time I can replace disk and carry on with my work as before.

I'm trying to simplify this, automate it. My goal is:
1. plug external USB disk and boot from it
2. "one click" action to execute cloning, let it work.
3. when done, unplug disk and reboot as normal.

I don't want to look for live CDs or use USB key linux installations to do this job everytime, I just want something that will reside on the same external disk, will boot up and do its job.

I tried something like this on virtual machine:
disk A: 300 MB disk, one primary partition, linux installation (DSL) (grub)
disk B: 1GB, actuall back up disk (USB)

I have created primary partition 4 on disk B of size 300MB at the end of the drive. Installed GRML linux on it and Grub as a boot manager. This is suppose to be backu up performing OS.

I've created shell script which does this:
1. backup MBR of disk B
Code:
dd if=/dev/sdb of=bMBR bs=512 count=1

2. backup MBR of disk A
Code:
dd if=/dev/sda of=aMBR bs=512 count=1

3. clone disk A to disk B from possition 0
Code:
dd_rescue /dev/sda /dev/sdb

4. restore disk B MBR so it can be used to backup next time again
Code:
dd of=/dev/sdb if=bMBR bs=512 count=1

when I wanted to use disk B as regular disk I copied back MBR of disk A.
Code:
dd of=/dev/sdb if=aMBR bs=512 count=1

and it shoudl boot up from disk B as it would from disk A, disk B should be regular clone of disk A.

I didn't get expected results.
In first case when disk B should have its original MBR, after cloning it does hang at boot time with black screen and GRUB written on top.
If I copy MBR of disk A to disk B and try to boot from disk B, boot manager seem to be ok but I get kernel panic message from DSL linux with no more info.

I'm not an expert in this field I just wanted to confirm with more experienced users whether I'm just missing something or going completely wrong route. So I won't spend ages of trying to fix something that can't work this way.

Is there anyone who can direct me or give me some clues?

Thanks
 

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LEARN ABOUT OPENDARWIN

installgrub

installgrub(1M) 														   installgrub(1M)

NAME

       installgrub - install GRUB in a disk partition or a floppy

SYNOPSIS

       /sbin/installgrub [-fm] stage1 stage2 raw-device

       The installgrub command is an -only program. GRUB stands for GRand Unified Bootloader.

       installgrub  installs  GRUB  stage  1  and  stage  2  files on the boot area of a disk partition. If you specify the -m option, installgrub
       installs the stage 1 file on the master boot sector of the disk.

       The installgrub command accepts the following options:

       -f

	   Suppresses interaction when overwriting the master boot sector.

       -m

	   Installs GRUB stage1 on the master boot sector interactively.

       The installgrub command accepts the following operands:

       stage1

	   The name of the GRUB stage 1 file.

       stage2

	   The name of the GRUB stage 2 file.

       raw-device

	   The name of the device onto which GRUB code is to be installed. It must be a character device that is readable and writable.  For  disk
	   devices,  specify  the  slice  where  the  GRUB  menu  file	is  located.  (For Solaris it is the root slice.) For a floppy disk, it is
	   /dev/rdiskette.

       Example 1: Installing GRUB on a Hard Disk Slice

       The following command installs GRUB on a system where the root slice is c0d0s0:

       example# /sbin/installgrub /boot/grub/stage1 
		/boot/grub/stage2 /dev/rdsk/c0d0s0

       Example 2: Installing GRUB on a Floppy

       The following command installs GRUB on a formatted floppy:

       example# mount -F pcfs /dev/diskette /mnt
       # mkdir -p /mnt/boot/grub
       # cp /boot/grub/* /mnt/boot/grub
       # umount /mnt
       # cd /boot/grub
       # /sbin/installgrub stage1 stage2 /dev/rdiskette

       /boot/grub

	   Directory where GRUB files reside.

       See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes:

       +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+
       |      ATTRIBUTE TYPE	     |	    ATTRIBUTE VALUE	   |
       +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+
       |Availability		     |SUNWcsu			   |
       +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+
       |Interface Stability	     |Evolving			   |
       +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+

       boot(1M), fdisk(1M), fmthard(1M), kernel(1M), attributes(5)

       Installing GRUB on the master boot sector (-m option) overrides any boot manager currently installed on the machine. The system will always
       boot the GRUB in the Solaris partition regardless of which fdisk partition is active.

								    24 May 2005 						   installgrub(1M)
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